FL (programming language)

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FL
Paradigm	function-level, functional
Appeared in	1989
Designed by	John Backus, John Williams, Edward Wimmers
Typing discipline	dynamic
Influenced by	FP
Influenced	J

FL (short for Function Level) is a programming language created at the IBM Almaden Research Center by John Backus, John Williams, and Edward Wimmers in 1989.

FL was designed as a successor of Backus' earlier FP programming language, providing specific support for what Backus termed function-level programming.

FL is a dynamically typed strict functional language with throw and catch exception semantics much like in ML. Each function has an implicit history argument which is used for doing things like strictly functional I/O, but is also used for linking to C code. For doing optimization, there exists a type-system which is an extension of Hindley-Milner type inference.

Many of the language’s innovative, arguably important ideas have now been implemented in Kenneth E. Iverson’s J programming language.