I've sometimes thought that a functional language would be the ideal platform to usher in a purely graphical style of programming; there have been a few attempts over the years to do purely graphical programming, but they seem to founder somewhat on impedance mismatch between static visual presentation and dynamic behaviour of an imperative program, and I could see referential transparency eliminating some of these difficulties. Also, one could very easily imagine a graphical representation of a "point free" style of programming, with its emphasis on combination of functions. The Lego Mindstorms system is representative of the kind of environment where I think graphical and functional styles could merge very neatly.
#g --
At 18:34 11/11/03 +0000, Keith Hanna wrote:
Dear Haskellers,
I am pleased to announce the release of Vital, an interactive visual programming environment based on Haskell.
Vital provides the user with a workspace within which Haskell expressions and declarations can be located and their values displayed textually or graphically. The display is 'live' in the sense that the effects of graphical Copy and Paste operations carried out displayed values are automatically reflected in the Haskell source code.
The long-term aim of the Vital project is to make Haskell available in a form that supports the open-ended, incremental style of program development that end users (engineers, scientists, analysts, etc.) often prefer. It may also be useful in teaching Haskell.
This release of the Vital system is available from: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/vital/
The site includes screenshots and a downloadable implementation with demo programs.
If you happen to have Java installed on your machine, you can (in principle!) run the Vital interpreter and these demo programs simply by clicking on this link http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/vital/download/start.jnlp
Enjoy!
Keith Hanna
_______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
------------ Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
_______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
