Designed by David Turner in 1983-1985, Miranda is a pure, non-strict, polymorphic, higher-order functional programming language.
To a large extent, Miranda was a successor to Turner's earlier programming language, SASL, and KRC, although it was also influenced by ML and Hope. First appearing in 1985, with subsequent releases in 1987 and 1989, Miranda was produced by Research Software of England, which holds a trademark on the name. It was one of the first purely functional languages to be commercially supported.
Upon its release, Miranda served as a fast interpreter in C for Unix-like operating systems. It strongly influenced the development of Haskell, and also influenced Clean, Orwell, and Microsoft Power Fx. Although Haskell was heralded as a replacement for Miranda, Turner held that, as compared to Haskell, Miranda was a smaller language with a simpler type system and simpler arithmetic.
While Miranda was considered by many to be a dead language, with the rising popularity of Haskell, a new version of Miranda was released as open-source under a BSD license in 2020. The new version updates the code to conform to modern C standards, and to generate 64-bit binaries. The 2020 version has been tested on Debian, Ubuntu, and macOS.
As a lazy, purely functional programming language, Miranda lacks side effects and imperative programming features. A Miranda program, called a script, is a set of equations that define various mathematical functions and algebraic data types. Miranda's basic data types are char, num, and bool. A character string is simply a list of char, while num is silently converted between two underlying forms: arbitrary-precision integers (bignums) by default, and regular floating-point values as required. Tuples are sequences of elements of potentially mixed types, analogous to records in Pascal-like languages, and are written delimited with parenthesis.
The aim of the Miranda system is to provide a modern functional programming language, embedded in a convenient programming environment, suitable both for teaching and as a general-purpose programming tool.
The new open-source version of Miranda is available on GitHub.
This portion of our guide to programming languages features the Miranda programming language. Topics related to any version of the language are appropriate for this category, including repositories, source codes, libraries, compilers, IDEs, editors, or any tools or utilities designed to facilitate Miranda programming. Miranda user groups or communities, forums, guides, or tutorials may also be listed here.
Recommended Resources
Hosted on GitHub, this is the official repository for the 2020 release of the open-source version of the Miranda programming language. The repository contains everything necessary to create a working version of the Miranda system, along with instructions for installing the programming language, and what to do if anything needs changing. Miranda is a pure, non-strict, polymorphic, higher-order functional programming language originally designed in 1983-1986.
https://github.com/ncihnegn/miranda
GitHub is an AI-powered developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code, and is commonly used to host open-source software development projects. GitHub repositories relating to the Miranda programming language are listed here, as well as perhaps any other projects using the name "Miranda." Included are official repositories for the language source code and utilities, as well as plugins and other tools or utilities.
https://github.com/topics/miranda
Developed by David Turner and produced by Research Software of England, Miranda is a lazy, purely functional programming language that was first released in 1985 as a fast interpreter in C for Unix-like operating systems. Versions are available for Linux, Windows, Intel/Solaris, SUN/Solaris, and Mac. Book references to the language are cited, along with background papers, and other resources related to the language. An online manual is available, and the package may be downloaded from the site.
https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/
The full text of the book, "Programming with Miranda," by C. Clack, C. Myers, and E. Poon, and originally published by Prentice Hall, is available here in PDF format, with the table of contents, preface, introduction, and first two chapters in one PDF file, and chapters 3-9 in separate PDF files, one for each chapter, with three additional PDF files for the bibliography, appendix, and solutions to exercises. An HTML page gives corrections to printing errors found in the book.
http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/3C11/book/book.html
