Home Page

This page is about While' a simple, untyped, imperative programming language.

Introduction

While' is a simple imperative language based on While from the Nielson, Nielson, Hankin _Principles of Program Analysis_ book. While' is an untyped imperative programming language supporting records, references, atoms, sub-recursive looping, and local assignment (let). I intend to use it for some research purposes, but offer it to anyone who's interested. There is currently an implementation in O'Caml.

Download

Although I intend for While' to be open-source, I have not yet put the proper licensing information in the files, so I will—for the meantime—release only binaries:

• Semantics of While' (returning soon!)
• While' Introduction / Tutorial (pdf)
• While' Interpreter
  • byte-compiled O'Caml (should work on most *nix's)
  • native-compiled for Win32 (includes required Cygwin dll; I suspect this is consistent with the Cygwin license)

Screenshot

While' in action demonstrating the Fibonacci list and traversal of a circularly-linked list

Description

While' is an experimental interpreted imperative language designed for use in my (future) research. Some important language features are:

• dynamic typing
• extensible records
• references
• let (local assignment)
• integer (for) and list (foreach) looping
• a small library of built-in functions for:
  • mathematics
  • Boolean algebra
  • comparison
  • list operations

More Information

For more information, you're very much encouraged to read the tutorial or the semantics! If you still have any questions, you can mail me at the address provided in the tutorial / semantics pdf's. Feedback is also very welcome about any bugs, etc. that you've encountered.