David Turner
Designer of SASL, KRC and Miranda
David Turner is best known as the inventor of combinator graph reduction and for designing and implementing a series of purely functional programming languages – SASL (1972), KRC (1981) and the commercially supported Miranda (1985) - that had a strong influence on the development of the field and on the emergence of Haskell.
He invented or coinvented many of the ideas which are now standard in functional programming, including pattern matching with guards, list comprehensions and the "list of successes" method for eliminating backtracking.
David has a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and has held professorships at Queen Mary College, London, University of Texas at Austin and the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he has spent most of his career and is now Emeritus Professor of Computation. He is also an Emeritus Professor at Middlesex University, England.
Past Activities
David Turner
Code Mesh V
Code Mesh V
05 Nov 2020
11.30 - 12.10
11.30 - 12.10
Open Sourcing Miranda
Miranda is a lazy, polymorphic, purely functional language which David developed in the 1980's. It was quite widely used and the main precursor of Haskell. The Miranda system was closed source, 32 bit code, distributed under license.
In this talk David will describe the process of updating Miranda to Open Source for 64 bit platforms. This involved two steps; first converting the code from "Kernigan & Ritchie" C to C 2011, then changing it from 32bits to 64bits.
Finally, David will outline his plans for Miranda now it is alive again.