categories: Re: Computing with Category Theory

[Phil Scott <phil@mathstat.uottawa.ca>]

Dear Saul:
   There are several category-based programming languages, but
they may be a bit hard to find on first glance.  Here are three that
come to mind, but I'm sure you will hear about more:

1.  The most famous is CAML, which stands for Categorical Abstract Machine
Language, and is a variant of ML, a well-known and robust polymorphic
functional language.  The original implementations arose from work on
categorical combinators, but now is an autonomous programming language by
itself.   http://caml.inria.fr/

2.  Two category theorists who have developped programming languages are:

(i) Robin Cockett, with his language Charity:
      http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Research/charity/home.html

(ii) Barry Jay, with his language FISh:
http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~cbj/FISh/
  


			Philip Scott
			Dept. of Math & Stats
			U. Ottawa


> 
> 
> Greetings to all,
> 
>        I'm a big fan of category theory, but doesn't it seem strange 
> that after all this time
> there is no programming language that let's you organize things around 
> categorical ideas?
> I've semi-seriously tried to find out about this ( 
> http://physics.bu.edu/~youssef/aldor/aldor.html )
> but I basically don't have an answer.  I'd be very interested to hear if 
> anyone
> is working in this direction or comments about why this hasn't happened.
> 
> Saul Youssef
> http://physics.bu.edu/~youssef/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>