Functional Programming in Computer Science

Technical Report · Tue Jan 19 04:00:00 EST 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1237221· OSTI ID:1237221

Anderson, Loren James ^[1]; Davis, Marion Kei ^[1]

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1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

We explore functional programming through a 16-week internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Functional programming is a branch of computer science that has exploded in popularity over the past decade due to its high-level syntax, ease of parallelization, and abundant applications. First, we summarize functional programming by listing the advantages of functional programming languages over the usual imperative languages, and we introduce the concept of parsing. Second, we discuss the importance of lambda calculus in the theory of functional programming. Lambda calculus was invented by Alonzo Church in the 1930s to formalize the concept of effective computability, and every functional language is essentially some implementation of lambda calculus. Finally, we display the lasting products of the internship: additions to a compiler and runtime system for the pure functional language STG, including both a set of tests that indicate the validity of updates to the compiler and a compiler pass that checks for illegal instances of duplicate names.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC52-06NA25396
• OSTI ID: 1237221
• Report Number(s): LA--UR-16-20225
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Computer Science