Fri, 19 Sep 2008

FP-Syd #7.

Last night was the 7th meeting of FP-Syd, the Sydney Functional Programming group with 26 people attending. We had had three short presentations.

First up was Jeremy Apthorp explaining the Y Combinator using a Haskell-like syntax instead of the more usual LISP syntax.

The second presentation was Ben Sinclair giving us a introduction to the Scala language. Scala is a functional language targeting the Java Virtual Machine. Its syntax is Java like, but with elements of ML and things that looked a little like Python. Under the hood, Scala is a traditional object-oriented lagngauge where everything except a few primitive types are derived from a base Object class. Scala can also call into any Java library.

Finally we had Eric Willigers talking about parser combinators in Scala. Eric's first example was just a parser that did parenthesis and square bracket matching. He then showed a more complex example, a partial implementation of a parser for the C language. Interesting.

Once again a big thank you to Google for supplying the venue as well as food and drinks.

Posted at: 21:39 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink