Abstract

. We present the design rationale of a constructor class-based implementation of a graphical user interface library. This library, named TkGofer, provides a convenient way to write window-oriented applications in the pure, functional programming language Gofer, using the user interface toolkit Tcl/Tk. The principal contribution of the approach embodied in the library is its flexibility and its type security to specify the appearance and behaviour of individual widgets and their composition. 1 Introduction Functional programming languages offer many advantages to programmers. Using functional languages often results in faster development times and shorter code compared with imperative languages. Furthermore, reasoning about and reusing programs is easier. Recent research in the field of functional programming resulted in new concepts such as monads to tame the imperative aspects of IO and state [12], and constructor classes to deal with higher order polymorphism [7]. Today, the specific...

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