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The ins and outs of Clean I/O

Part of: JFP Research Articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Peter Achten  and
Rinus Plasmeijer
Peter Achten
Affiliation:
Computing Science Institute, University of Nijmegen, 1 Toernooiveld, 6525ED, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (e-mail: peter88@cs.kun.nl)
Rinus Plasmeijer
Affiliation:
Computing Science Institute, University of Nijmegen, 1 Toernooiveld, 6525ED, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (e-mail: peter88@cs.kun.nl)
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Abstract

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Functional programming languages have banned assignment because of its undesirable properties. The reward of this rigorous decision is that functional programming languages are side-effect free. There is another side to the coin: because assignment plays a crucial role in Input/Output (I/O), functional languages have a hard time dealing with I/O. Functional programming languages have therefore often been stigmatised as inferior to imperative programming languages because they cannot deal with I/O very well. In this paper, we show that I/O can be incorporated in a functional programming language without loss of any of the generally accepted advantages of functional programming languages. This discussion is supported by an extensive account of the I/O system offered by the lazy, purely functional programming language Clean. Two aspects that are paramount in its I/O system make the approach novel with respect to other approaches. These aspects are the technique of explicit multiple environment passing, and the Event I/O framework to program Graphical User I/O in a highly structured and high-level way. Clean file I/O is as powerful and flexible as it is in common imperative languages (one can read, write, and seek directly in a file). Clean Event I/O provides programmers with a high-level framework to specify complex Graphical User I/O. It has been used to write applications such as a window-based text editor, an object based drawing program, a relational database, and a spreadsheet program. These graphical interactive programs are completely machine independent, but still obey the look-and-feel of the concrete window environment being used. The specifications are completely functional and make extensive use of uniqueness typing, higher-order functions, and algebraic data types. Efficient implementations are present on the Macintosh, Sun (X Windows under Open Look) and PC (OS/2).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Functional Programming , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 1995 , pp. 81 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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