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/