Lambda the Ultimate

Boring...
started 7/2/2002; 3:13:02 PM - last post 7/3/2002; 3:27:07 AM

7/2/2002; 3:13:02 PM (reads: 1246, responses: 2)

Boring...

When all the posts on the home page are from me, I know it's time to remind our contributors to, well... contribute!

Since I am quite busy (the exam season just started) most of my posts are nothing more than general info. We need more theory, new and interesting functional programming links, and more on the Logic/Declerative paradigms.

In fact we even haven't mentioned OOP in quite sometime.

And if you aren't a contributing editor, remember you can always post a highbrow troll in the discussion group, and see what happens

Remember, LtU is a community, not a website..

Posted to admin by Ehud Lamm on 7/2/02; 3:18:03 PM

jon fernquest - Re: Boring...

7/3/2002; 2:07:05 AM (reads: 1084, responses: 0)

I'm not an editor, but I'd still like to contribute to the community. (I apologize if I've made "high-brow troll" responses to some postings.)

Here's a posting in the Logic/Declarative department:

The OpenNLP Grok Library

Grok is an open source natural language processing library written in Java. It is part of the OpenNLP project, and provides implementations for most of the interfaces defined in the opennlp.common package

Categorial grammar using unification and feature structures are at the cutting edge of mastering the complexity behind natural languages. Can this programming paradigm be used to handle complexity in other application areas as well?

Grok's Java is easier to integrate into existing software systems than previous systems written in proprietary Lisp Lingo or Prolog ALE.

The best description of the project is in the sourceforge forum. There are also related papers at the author's site.

jon fernquest - Re: Boring...

7/3/2002; 3:27:07 AM (reads: 1016, responses: 0)

Here's a new functional programming link:

Declarative Event-Oriented Programming

Typically, programmers make use of a fixed set of low level events supplied by a window system, possibly augmented with timers and UI components.... It is possible to extend the event paradigm by using an algebra of events to synthesize new kinds of events tailored specifically for a domain or application. In turn, these 22new events may be used to synthesize yet others, and so on, to an arbitrarily sophisticated degree.... We propose a declarative approach to event-oriented programming, based on a powerfully expressive event language with a lightweight notation. We illustrate this new approach through the design of an interactive curve editor.

The paper presents an editor for bezier curves. Similar to Genuinely Functional User Interfaces by the same author. Concise formulaic descriptions of complicated GUI functionality like this should be easier to reuse than non-functional code. One good reason to start using the functional members of the .NET language family SML.NET and F#. Since the paper deals with "events tailored specifically for a domain" it might also qualify for the DSL category.