Category theorists invented monads in the 1960's to concisely express certain aspects of universal algebra. Functional programmers invented list comprehensions in the 1970's to concisely express certain programs involving lists. This paper shows how list comprehensions may be generalised to an arbitrary monad, and how the resulting programming feature can concisely express in a pure functional language some programs that manipulate state, handle exceptions, parse text, or invoke continuations. A new solution to the old problem of destructive array update is also presented. No knowledge of category theory is assumed.

Abstract. Functional logic programming languages combine the most important declarative programming paradigms, and attempts to combine these paradigms have a long history. The declarative multi-paradigm language Curry is influenced by recent advances in the foundations and implementation of functional logic languages. The development of Curry is an international initiative intended to provide a common platform for the research, teaching, and application of integrated functional logic languages. This paper surveys the foundations of functional logic programming that are relevant for Curry, the main features of Curry, and extensions and applications of Curry and functional logic programming. 1

From the type of a polymorphic function we can derive a theorem that it satisfies. Every function of the same type satisfies the same theorem. This provides a free source of useful theorems, courtesy of Reynolds' abstraction theorem for the polymorphic lambda calculus.

We develop a calculus for lazy functional programming based on recursion operators associated with data type definitions. For these operators we derive various algebraic laws that are useful in deriving and manipulating programs. We shall show that all example functions in Bird and Wadler's "Introduction to Functional Programming" can be expressed using these operators. 1 Introduction Among the many styles and methodologies for the construction of computer programs the Squiggol style in our opinion deserves attention from the functional programming community. The overall goal of Squiggol is to calculate programs from their specification in the way a mathematician calculates solutions to differential equations, or uses arithmetic to solve numerical problems. It is not hard to state, prove and use laws for well-known operations such as addition, multiplication and ---at the function level--- composition. It is, however, quite hard to state, prove and use laws for arbitrarily recursively ...

We study Girard's Linear Logic from the point of view of giving a concrete computational interpretation of the logic, based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism. In the case of Intuitionistic Linear Logic, this leads to a refinement of the lambda calculus, giving finer control over order of evaluation and storage allocation, while maintaining the logical content of programs as proofs, and computation as cut-elimination.

Region-based memory management is an alternative to standard tracing garbage collection that makes potentially dangerous operations such as memory deallocation explicit but verifiably safe. In this article, we present a new compiler intermediate language, called the Capability Calculus, that supports region-based memory management and enjoys a provably safe type system. Unlike previous region-based type systems, region lifetimes need not be lexically scoped and yet the language may be checked for safety without complex analyses. Therefore, our type system may be deployed in settings such as extensible operating systems where both the performance and safety of untrusted code is important.

The Spineless Tagless G-machine is an abstract machine designed to support nonstrict higher-order functional languages. This presentation of the machine falls into three parts. Firstly, we give a general discussion of the design issues involved in implementing non-strict functional languages. Next, we present the STG language, an austere but recognisably-functional language, which as well as a denotational meaning has a well-defined operational semantics. The STG language is the "abstract machine code" for the Spineless Tagless G-machine. Lastly, we discuss the mapping of the STG language onto stock hardware. The success of an abstract machine model depends largely on how efficient this mapping can be made, though this topic is often relegated to a short section. Instead, we give a detailed discussion of the design issues and the choices we have made. Our principal target is the C language, treating the C compiler as a portable assembler. Version 2.5 of this paper (minus appendix) appe...

Lists are often used as "glue" to connect separate parts of a program together. We propose an automatic technique for improving the efficiency of such programs, by removing many of these intermediate lists, based on a single, simple, local transformation. We have implemented the method in the Glasgow Haskell compiler.

This paper describes a flexible type system which combines overloading and higher-order polymorphism in an implicitly typed language using a system of constructor classes -- a natural generalization of type classes in Haskell. We present a wide range of examples which demonstrate the usefulness of such a system. In particular, we show how constructor classes can be used to support the use of monads in a functional language. The underlying type system permits higher-order polymorphism but retains many of many of the attractive features that have made the use of Hindley/Milner type systems so popular. In particular, there is an effective algorithm which can be used to calculate principal types without the need for explicit type or kind annotations. A prototype implementation has been developed providing, amongst other things, the first concrete implementation of monad comprehensions known to us at the time of writing. 1 An overloaded map function Many functional programs use the map ...

this paper. Pleasingly, the arrow interface turned out to be applicable to other kinds of non-monadic library also, for example the fudgets library for graphical user interfaces [CH93], and a new library for programming active web pages. These applications will be described in sections 6 and 9. While arrows are a little less convenient to use than monads, they have significantly wider applicability. They can therefore be used to bring the benefits of monad-like programming to a much wider class of applications. 2 Background: Library Design Using Monads