Threaded interpretive systems and functional programming environments

Abstract

While languages based upon threaded interpretive systems have been used for a variety of applications, these systems have been generally ignored by serious students of programming languages. We describe research here at the University of South Florida where we are investigating the suitability of these systems for implementing a programming environment - specifically an environment to support programming in a functional style.We hypothesize that threaded interpretive systems may have merit as the basis for more ambitious language implementations than have yet been attempted - and that such languages may offer a reasonable compromise between the flexability of more interpretive systems and the efficiency of compilers that generate native code. We describe extensions to a threaded language which provide the kernel of a functional style language. Our goal is to gain insight into the real and apparent capabilities of threaded languages and to evaluate the potential of such systems for support of functional programming environments.