37 lines
1.7 KiB
Text
37 lines
1.7 KiB
Text
Q is a powerful and extensible functional programming language based on the
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term rewriting calculus. You specify an arbitrary system of equations which
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the interpreter uses as rewrite rules to reduce expressions to normal form. Q
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is useful for scientific programming and other advanced applications, and also
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as a sophisticated kind of desktop calculator. The distribution includes the Q
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programming tools, the standard library, add-on modules for interfacing to GNU
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dbm, ODBC, GNU Octave, GGI, ImageMagick, Tcl/Tk and IBM's Data Explorer, and
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an Emacs mode.
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Q's main features:
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- advanced symbolic expression manipulation, using equations supplied by the
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programmer
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- fast bytecode interpreter, which executes Q scripts almost as fast as
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interpreted Lisp or Haskell
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- built-in support for arbitrary precision integers, double precision floating
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point numbers, strings, lists, tuples, curried function applications, lazy
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evaluation, exception handling, and user-defined object-oriented data types
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with single inheritance
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- simple but powerful module system which lets you manage large scripts with
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ease, and a libtool-based interface to external C modules which allows such
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modules to be loaded at runtime
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- comprehensive standard library written mostly in Q itself, which includes
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powerful list processing functions, a collection of useful container data
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structures, an implementation of the lambda calculus, an interface to the
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PostScript language, and a system interface featuring binary and C-style
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formatted I/O, file system and process manipulation utilities, POSIX
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threads, BSD sockets, regular expression matching, ...
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WWW: http://q-lang.sourceforge.net/
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- Albert Graef
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ag@muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
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