epsilon

Table of Contents

• Introduction to epsilon
• Downloading epsilon
• epsilon documentation
• About the authors

Introduction to epsilon

This is a web page about GNU epsilon, a strongly-typed statically-scoped higher-order purely functional language.

epsilon is oriented to expressivity and efficiency. The static scoping rule and the type checkings at compile-time should make epsilon programs "safe" and "fast". The language is relatively simple at this stage but it is going to evolve. Its current main features are:

• Integer, floats, characters, strings, booleans and voids as "ground" values; functions, tuples, lists and arrays as primitive constuctors for higher-order types.
• Eager evaluation rule by default
• Lisp-style promises (but epsilon promises are typed) to simulate call-by-name
• Strong static type system
• Polymorphism
• Type inference
• Concrete parametric data types, even mutually recursive
• Abstract parametric data types
• Omega-order functions as first-class values
• Exceptions
• Automatic memory management, using a garbage collector
• Preliminary Read-Eval-Print Loop interface (broken at this time)
• A modules system
• Compilation via generation of fast C code or (soon to come) Scheme code. Translating into Scheme will be useful to enable applications supporting Guile to be extended also with epsilon code.
• a scanner generator, in the style of lex
• a parser generator in the style of yacc, but supporting canonical LR(1) grammars
• a purely function I/O system, inspired by Haskell

• library support for manipulating epsilon code as data (a-la-Lisp)
• meta-interpreter
• meta-compiler
• classes a-la-Haskell
• call-by-name for selected parameters
• CORBA bindings
• Bonobo bindings
• a scalable implementation exploiting the implicit parallelism of functional expressions on SMPs and clusters

Downloading epsilon

GNU epsilon is not yet available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/epsilon. The first official release of GNU epsilon (there have been some before epsilon was dubbed part of the GNU Project) will be available as soon as it'll be usable by the general public.

The latest CVS version (recent but not necessarily stable) is always available. See the epsilon project page on GNU Savannah.

epsilon documentation

The epsilon manual is available here in several formats including HTML, TeX DVI, PostScript, PDF, Info and the Texinfo source. It is still quite far from being complete, but already includes a useful functional programming tutorial also adapt to non-programmers.

The manual is also included in all epsilon archives, and can be easily translated into a variety of formats.

About the authors

epsilon is brought to you by Luca Saiu (maintainer), with help from Matteo Golfarini. See the file AUTHORS in epsilon archives for more contact information.

For this page: Copyright © 2002, 2003 Luca Saiu

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