[clean-list] History of "Clean Functional Language."

[rinus plasmeijer]

Hi Athos,

> Dear "Clean" Personnel. My name is Athos Georgio and i'm a Computer 
> science major in the University Of Louisiana at Monroe. I'm currently 
> writing a research paper regarding a functional language and i chose 
> clean. I have searched all over the web for historical information of this 
> language and it is almost impossible to find anything. Is it possible that 
> you provide me with some info on this matter?

You can find some words and references about the history of Clean in the
language manual.

We started the work on Clean in 1984, as part of the Parallel Reduction
Machine project.
In the beginning, Clean was meant as an intermediate language.
The first version was defined and running in 1987.
Hereafter Clean was turned into a fully featured functional programming
language.
Special features are its Graph Rewriting Semantics (1987, Barendregt,
Plasmeijer, Van Eekelen) which is still the core semantics of Clean, Eric
Nockers strictness analyser (1994, very recently completely formally proven
to be correct),
the uniqueness typing (Smetsers, Barendsen,Plasmeijer), the object I/O
library (Peter Achten),
the concurrent implementation (Marco Kesseler), and, of course the very good
code generation (John van Groningen).
There is many more.
You can find all our papers on the net:
http://www.cs.ru.nl/st/Onderzoek/Publicaties/publicaties.html

We had a lot of influence on Haskell (which started in 1987) and later also
Haskell influenced Clean.

If you have concrete questions, please ask,

greetings,

Rinus