Professor Fish

Introduction This text is about the code distribution that you find here (@ SourceForge project developers ). Released: 24 Aug 2010 Last updated: 31 Aug 2010 We walk through the evolution of a simple interpreter. This exercise is meant to explore functional programming in the context of language interpreters. We start from a trivial language which can generate natural numbers. Step by step, we add some language constructs that make us deal with partiality of interpretation, type tests, a binding mechanism, and different forms of recursion. None of these evolution steps are particularly advanced. The contribution of this code distribution lies more in the pedagogical style of making simple, well-understood extensions, and reflecting on the functional programming issues that pop up as well as the code-level organization and reusability that is achievable. (For the actual reflection, I recommend the upcoming Channel9 lecture on language interpretation that will use some part of the code ...

[ Added 10 Aug 2010: Here is the link to the first lecture's video: " The Expression Problem ". ] If you are a programming nerd or something of a similar species, you may know of C9 Lectures at http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/C9+Lectures . Several of the lectures are given by Erik Meijer who has turned many chapters of Graham Hutton 's book " Programming in Haskell " into videos. In my recent, recorded lecture on " Programming Paradigms and Formal Semantics ", I also incorporated Graham's text, but you should really watch Erik's lectures, if you haven't---they are more fun. I am inspired by his ability to present relatively simple content in such a crisp, insightful, and enjoyable manner. In the aforementioned lecture, I covered all kinds of "crazy stuff" though, and in the end, I had to deliver body bags to my Bachelor students---in the form of a radically simple examination. Thanks a lot btw to @grammarware for helping with t...