The Glasgow Functional Programming Group is widely recognised for its research in lazy functional languages. Once again this year, for the fifth time, we retreated to a Scottish seaside town to discuss our latest work, this time spending three days in Ayr. We were joined by a number of colleagues from other universities and from industry, with whom we have been enjoying fruitful collaboration. The workshop serves the dual purpose of ensuring that the whole group remains informed of each other's work, and of providing workshop experience for research students. Most participants presented a short talk about their work, supplemented by papers which appeared in a draft proceedings distributed at the workshop. Since then the papers have been reviewed and the majority are now published here following revision. The workshop also contained a lively discussion session on functional language applications, to which the industrial participants made very helpful contributions. One interesting feature of this volume is the number of papers addressing practical issues of realistic use of functional languages, from benchmarking and profiling, to user interfaces and file handling. It is perhaps indicative that at last lazy functional languages are being used for significantly larger applications than has been typical in the past. This type of paper is likely to feature prominently in relevant conference proceedings for the next few years. Other papers here continue to address more theoretical topics, such as program logic, semantics of non determinism, program analysis, and loop detection.

Klappentext

This volume contains the papers presented at the latest Glasgow Workshop on Functional Programming, held in Ayr, Scotland, 6-8 July 1992. These workshops have been held annually by the Glasgow Functional Programming group since 1988. Despite the obvious advantages of functional programming, there are still several unresolved research issues which prevent it from reaching its full potential. The workshops provide a valuable opportunity for the investigation of these issues, and for the presentation of current research work. They also allow in-depth discussion between members of the group and invited contributors from industry and other institutions. The papers presented at the workshop concentrated on the design and implementation of functional programming languages, including profiling, compiling, and extensions to Haskell. Other papers addressed the related issues of program derivation and formal reasoning. Among the specific topics covered in this volume are: naturally embedded query languages; a framework for program analysis of logics; analysing functions by projection-based backward abstraction; compile-time optimisation of storage utilisation for lazy first order functional programs; a relational derivation of a functional program; programming with conductor classes; avoiding unnecessary updates; LZW compression in Haskell; program transformation in the Glasgow Haskell compiler; formulating Haskell. BFunctional Programming, Glasgow 1992/B provides an up-to-date cross-section of the latest work on functional programming. It will be of interest to postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners involved in both practical and theoretical aspects of the subject.

Inhalt
High Level Specification of I/O in Functional Languages.- GRIT: Guy's RISC Implementation of the Three Instruction Machine.- A Logical Framework for Program Analysis.- Analysing Functions by Projection-Based Backward Abstraction.- Abstract Interpretation of Higher Order Functions Using Concrete Data Structures (Summary).- The Glasgow Haskell Compiler: A Retrospective.- Improving Persistent Data Manipulation for Functional Languages.- A Loop-Detecting Interpreter for Lazy, Higher-Order Programs.- A Semantics for Locally Bottom-Avoiding Choice.- A Certain Loss of Identity.- Programming with Constructor Classes (Preliminary Summary).- Combining Monads.- Avoiding Unnecessary Updates.- Deforestation for Higher-Order Functions.- Hazard Algebra and the Design of Asynchronous Automata.- Generating Netlists from Executable Circuit Specifications in a Pure Functional Language.- The nofib Benchmark Suite of Haskell Programs.- Heap Profiling of a Lazy Functional Compiler.- LZW Text Compression in Haskell.- Profiling Lazy Functional Programs.- On Program Transformation in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.- Graphical User Interfaces for Haskell.- Formulating Haskell.- Author Index.