DEVELOPMENT OF HOPE INTERPRETER

Abstract

The functional programs are more problem oriented, shorter, easy to enhance and maintain and they generally exhibit more inherent parallelism than the conventional language programs. Due to these striking features functional languages have become the focus of active research and a number of implementations for these languages have been proposed. The current work deals with the design and development of an interpreter for the functional language Hope. The interpreter is developed for IBM-PC using Turbo C as the source language. This interpreter uses strict evaluation mechanism to compute the value of an expression. To be able to define a recursive function by a single conditional expression, the evaluation of 'if' function has been made 'lazy'. The interpreter permits the function definitions with overlapping patterns or patterns containing multiple occurrences of a variable. Dynamic and automatic memory management is employed so that the interpreter makes efficient utilization of memory space. Several examples have been run successfully on the interpreter.