Lambda the Ultimate

I saw this mentioned by one of the authors on the erlang-questions mailing list:

The paper investigates the impact of high level distributed programming language constructs on the engineering of realistic software components. Based on reengineering two non-trivial telecoms components, we compare two high-level distributed functional languages, Erlang and GdH, with conventional distributed technologies C++/CORBA and C++/UDP.

GdH = Glasgow distributed Haskell.

A Functional Description of TeX's Formula Layout, Reinhold Heckmann and Reinhard Wilhelm, Journal of Functional Programming 1997.

While the quality of the results of TeX's mathematical formula layout algorithm is convincing, its original description is hard to understand since it is presented as an imperative program with complex control flow and destructive manipulations of the data structures representing formulae. In this paper, we present a re-implementation of TeX's formula layout algorithm in the functional language SML, thereby providing a more readable description of the algorithm, extracted from the monolithical TeX system.

I've wanted a simple description of what TeX is doing for a long time, and it's nice to see that laid out in a clear and readable way.

The first pre-release of the reference implementation of ECMAScript Edition 4 (a.k.a. JavaScript 2) is now available. We've created a new web site for information about the ECMAScript specification and reference implementation. You can download source and binary forms of the reference implementation.

As we've discussed before here on LtU, the reference implementation of ECMAScript is being written in Standard ML. This choice should have many benefits, including:

• to make the specification more precise than previous pseudocode conventions
• to give implementors an executable framework to test against
• to provide an opportunity to find bugs in the spec early
• to spark interest and spur feedback from the research and user communities
• to provide fodder for interesting program analyses to prove properties of the language (like various notions of type soundness)
• to use as a test-bed for interesting extensions to the language

This pre-release is just our first milestone, i.e., the first of many "early and often" releases. Neither the specification nor the reference implementation is complete, and this early implementation has plenty of bugs. We encourage anyone interested to browse the bug database and report additional bugs.

We're happy to hear your feedback, whether it's bug reports or comments here on LtU or on the es4-discuss mailing list.