Workshop on Functional Programming in the Real World

Hardware Limited (AHL) was formed to produce and sell formallybased tools for digital hardware design. We chose to construct these tools – the LAMBDA system – in Standard ML using (mostly) functional programming techniques. The LAMBDA system is now 7 years old and contains more than 170K lines of code, making it one of the world’s largest functional programs. This talk will discuss the consequences of the decision to use SML: • Do the well-publicised features of functional programming (polymorphism, higher-order functions, : : : ) actually produce real-world benefits? • Do these benefits out-weigh the real penalties (lack of mature implementations, problems interfacing to C-based system, : : : ) of using functional programming?