Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mailrus!cornell!murthy
From: murthy@algron.cs.cornell.edu (Chet Murthy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: Impact of FPL's on OS design?
Message-ID: <43178@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 11 Jul 90 14:25:18 GMT
References: <2189@dali>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept. Ithaca NY
Lines: 22

icsu8209@khan.cs.montana.edu (Glassy) writes:


>From my various readings (local resources, + this newsgroup), it
>appears that one of major impacts of functional programming languages
>has been, is, will be, to put the creation of programs on a more
>mathematical (sounder? more provable?) basis.  Do any of the current
>FPL's (scheme, haskell, SML, Miranda, Hope) venture yet into the
>realm of OS implementation?  Are we doomed to suffer with C and its
>progeny ad-in-#define-itum for the implementation of operating system
>software?

The Pegasus people probably have a lot to say about this - they have
implemented an entire operating system in a variant of ML.  Now, of
course, this ML was quite imperative; nevertheless, they were able to
make good use of the polymorphism and higher-order features of ML.


   -- A woman who lets men pay her way (unless she simply acquiesces to
   their insistences over her stated wishes) is like a man who hangs
   around beautiful big-breasted women and marries for love.
   --chet the hardliner-- murthy@cs.cornell.edu