Greg Michaelson – författare

This well-respected text offers an accessible introduction to functional programming concepts and techniques for students of mathematics and computer science. The treatment is as nontechnical as possible, assuming no prior knowledge of mathematics or functional programming. Numerous exercises appear throughout the text, and all problems feature complete solutions. 1989 edition.

Nobody doubted that atoms were real once atomic energy was developed, but in the early 20th-century and before their existence was widely doubted. Defending Materialism follows the political and theoretical background of this intense philosophical controversy, defending atomistic and mechanical materialism against idealist paradigms. These accounts range from the explicit idealism criticised by Lenin and Einstein to the implicit Hegelian idealism that influenced Soviet dialectical materialism.Following several key threads, the authors trace how the idea of atoms has changed over the centuries, how ideology has influenced both sides of the idealism/materialism divide, and how the nature of time in physics, biology and human society can give a fresh view of historical materialism. Starting from the origins of materialism in ancient Greek thought and moving through its revival in Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin gives a full picture of the links between the Marxist tradition and the ‘coarse materiality’ to which the worlds of science and philosophy have found themselves both subscribed and averse.

Nobody doubted that atoms were real once atomic energy was developed, but in the early 20th-century and before their existence was widely doubted. Defending Materialism follows the political and theoretical background of this intense philosophical controversy, defending atomistic and mechanical materialism against idealist paradigms. These accounts range from the explicit idealism criticised by Lenin and Einstein to the implicit Hegelian idealism that influenced Soviet dialectical materialism.Following several key threads, the authors trace how the idea of atoms has changed over the centuries, how ideology has influenced both sides of the idealism/materialism divide, and how the nature of time in physics, biology and human society can give a fresh view of historical materialism. Starting from the origins of materialism in ancient Greek thought and moving through its revival in Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin gives a full picture of the links between the Marxist tradition and the ‘coarse materiality’ to which the worlds of science and philosophy have found themselves both subscribed and averse.

Nobody doubted that atoms were real once atomic energy was developed, but in the early 20th-century and before their existence was widely doubted. Defending Materialism follows the political and theoretical background of this intense philosophical controversy, defending atomistic and mechanical materialism against idealist paradigms. These accounts range from the explicit idealism criticised by Lenin and Einstein to the implicit Hegelian idealism that influenced Soviet dialectical materialism.Following several key threads, the authors trace how the idea of atoms has changed over the centuries, how ideology has influenced both sides of the idealism/materialism divide, and how the nature of time in physics, biology and human society can give a fresh view of historical materialism. Starting from the origins of materialism in ancient Greek thought and moving through its revival in Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin gives a full picture of the links between the Marxist tradition and the ''coarse materiality'' to which the worlds of science and philosophy have found themselves both subscribed and averse.

Nobody doubted that atoms were real once atomic energy was developed, but in the early 20th-century and before their existence was widely doubted. Defending Materialism follows the political and theoretical background of this intense philosophical controversy, defending atomistic and mechanical materialism against idealist paradigms. These accounts range from the explicit idealism criticised by Lenin and Einstein to the implicit Hegelian idealism that influenced Soviet dialectical materialism.Following several key threads, the authors trace how the idea of atoms has changed over the centuries, how ideology has influenced both sides of the idealism/materialism divide, and how the nature of time in physics, biology and human society can give a fresh view of historical materialism. Starting from the origins of materialism in ancient Greek thought and moving through its revival in Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin gives a full picture of the links between the Marxist tradition and the ''coarse materiality'' to which the worlds of science and philosophy have found themselves both subscribed and averse.

Programming is hard. Building a large program is like constructing a steam locomotive through a hole the size of a postage stamp. An artefact that is the fruit of hundreds of person-years is only ever seen by anyone through a lOO-line window. In some ways it is astonishing that such large systems work at all. But parallel programming is much, much harder. There are so many more things to go wrong. Debugging is a nightmare. A bug that shows up on one run may never happen when you are looking for it - but unfailingly returns as soon as your attention moves elsewhere. A large fraction of the program''s code can be made up of marshalling and coordination algorithms. The core application can easily be obscured by a maze of plumbing. Functional programming is a radical, elegant, high-level attack on the programming problem. Radical, because it dramatically eschews side-effects; elegant, because of its close connection with mathematics; high-level, be­ cause you can say a lot in one line. But functional programming is definitely not (yet) mainstream. That''s the trouble with radical approaches: it''s hard for them to break through and become mainstream. But that doesn''t make functional programming any less fun, and it has turned out to be a won­ derful laboratory for rich type systems, automatic garbage collection, object models, and other stuff that has made the jump into the mainstream.

Programming is hard. Building a large program is like constructing a steam locomotive through a hole the size of a postage stamp. An artefact that is the fruit of hundreds of person-years is only ever seen by anyone through a lOO-line window. In some ways it is astonishing that such large systems work at all. But parallel programming is much, much harder. There are so many more things to go wrong. Debugging is a nightmare. A bug that shows up on one run may never happen when you are looking for it - but unfailingly returns as soon as your attention moves elsewhere. A large fraction of the program's code can be made up of marshalling and coordination algorithms. The core application can easily be obscured by a maze of plumbing. Functional programming is a radical, elegant, high-level attack on the programming problem. Radical, because it dramatically eschews side-effects; elegant, because of its close connection with mathematics; high-level, be­ cause you can say a lot in one line. But functional programming is definitely not (yet) mainstream. That's the trouble with radical approaches: it's hard for them to break through and become mainstream. But that doesn't make functional programming any less fun, and it has turned out to be a won­ derful laboratory for rich type systems, automatic garbage collection, object models, and other stuff that has made the jump into the mainstream.

Functional programminghas a long history,reaching back through early reali- tions in languages like LISP to foundational theories of computing, in particular ?-calculus and recursive function theory. In turn, functional programming has had wide in?uence in computing, both through developments within the dis- pline, such as formal semantics, polymorphic type checking, lazy evaluation and structural proof, and as a practical embodiment of formalized approaches, such as speci?cation, transformation and partial application. One of the engaging features of functional programming is precisely the crossover between theory and practice. In particular, it is regarded as ess- tial that all aspects of functional programming are appropriately formalized, especially the speci?cation and implementation of functional languages. Thus, specialist functional programming events like the International Workshop on the Implementation of Functional Languages (IFL) attract contributions where strong use is made of syntactic, semantic and meta-mathematical formalisms to motivate, justify and underpin very practical software systems.IFL grew out of smaller workshops aimed at practitioners wrestling with the nuts and bolts of making concrete implementations of highly abstract l- guages. Functional programming has always been bedeviled by an unwarranted reputation for slowand ine?cient implementations. IFL is one venue where such problemsaretackledheadon,alwaysusing formaltechniques to justify practical implementations.

The 16th International Workshop on Implementation and Application of Fu- tional Languages (IFL 2004) was held in Lub ¨ eck, Germany, September 8–10, 2004. It was jointly organized by the Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics of the University of Kiel and the Institute of Software Technology and Programming Languages of the University of Lub ¨ eck. IFL 2004 was the sixteenth event in the annual series of IFL workshops. The aim of the workshop series is to bring together researchers actively engaged in the implementation and application of functional and function-based progr- ming languages. It provides an open forum for researchers who wish to present and discuss new ideas and concepts, work in progress, preliminary results, etc., related primarily, but not exclusively, to the implementation and application of functional languages. Topics of interest cover a wide range from theoretical - pects over language design and implementation towards applications and tool support. Previous IFL workshops were held in the United Kingdom (Southampton, Norwich, London, St Andrews, and Edinburgh), in the Netherlands (Nijmegen and Lochem), in Germany (Aachen and Bonn), in Sweden (B? astad and Sto- holm), and in Spain (Madrid). In 2005, the 17th International Workshop on - plementation and Application of Functional Languages will be held in Dublin, Ireland.

The 16th International Workshop on Implementation and Application of Fu- tional Languages (IFL 2004) was held in Lub ¨ eck, Germany, September 8–10, 2004. It was jointly organized by the Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics of the University of Kiel and the Institute of Software Technology and Programming Languages of the University of Lub ¨ eck. IFL 2004 was the sixteenth event in the annual series of IFL workshops. The aim of the workshop series is to bring together researchers actively engaged in the implementation and application of functional and function-based progr- ming languages. It provides an open forum for researchers who wish to present and discuss new ideas and concepts, work in progress, preliminary results, etc., related primarily, but not exclusively, to the implementation and application of functional languages. Topics of interest cover a wide range from theoretical - pects over language design and implementation towards applications and tool support. Previous IFL workshops were held in the United Kingdom (Southampton, Norwich, London, St Andrews, and Edinburgh), in the Netherlands (Nijmegen and Lochem), in Germany (Aachen and Bonn), in Sweden (B? astad and Sto- holm), and in Spain (Madrid). In 2005, the 17th International Workshop on - plementation and Application of Functional Languages will be held in Dublin, Ireland.