Clean

language A lazy higher-order purely functionallanguage from the University of Nijmegen. Clean was

originally a subset of Lean, designed to be an experimental

intermediate language and used to study the graphrewriting model. To help focus on the essential

implementation issues it deliberately lacked all syntacticsugar, even infix expressions or complex lists,

As it was used more and more to construct all kinds of

applications it was eventually turned into a general purpose

functional programming language, first released in May 1995.

The new language is strongly typed (Milner/Mycroft type

system), provides modules and functional I/O (including a

WIMP interface), and supports parallel processing and

distributed processing on loosely coupled parallel

architectures. Parallel execution was originally based on the

PABC abstract machine.

It is one of the fastest implementations of functional

languages available, partly aided by programmer annotations

to influence evaluation order.

Although the two variants of Clean are rather different, the

name Clean can be used to denote either of them. To

distinguish, the old version can be referred to as Clean 0.8,

and the new as Clean 1.0 or Concurrent Clean.

The current release of Clean (1.0) includes a compiler,

producing code for the ABC abstract machine, a codegenerator, compiling the ABC code into either object-code

or assembly language (depending on the platform), I/O

libraries, a development environment (not all platforms),

and documentation. It is supported (or will soon be

supported) under Mac OS, Linux, OS/2, Windows 95,

SunOS, and Solaris.

Home . E-mail:

[email protected]. Mailing list: [email protected].

["Clean - A Language for Functional Graph Rewriting", T. Brus

et al, IR 95, U Nijmegen, Feb 1987].

["Concurrent Clean", M.C. van Eekelen et al, TR 89-18, U

Nijmegen, Netherlands, 1989].

[Jargon File]

(1995-11-08)