T (programming language)

Last updated
T
Paradigm Multi-paradigm: object-oriented, imperative, functional, meta
Family Lisp
Designed by Jonathan A. Rees
Norman I. Adams
Developers Jonathan A. Rees
Norman I. Adams
First appeared1982;39 years ago (1982)
Final release
3.0 / August 1, 1984;37 years ago (1984-08-01)
Typing discipline dynamic, strong
Platform Cross-platform
OS Cross-platform
Website mumble.net/~jar/tproject
Influenced by
Scheme
Influenced
EuLisp, Joule

T is a dialect of the Scheme programming language developed in the early 1980s by Jonathan A. Rees, Kent M. Pitman, and Norman I. Adams of Yale University as an experiment in language design and implementation. [1]

Contents

Rationale

T's purpose is to test the thesis developed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman in their series of papers about Scheme: that Scheme may be used as the basis for a practical programming language of exceptional expressive power, and that implementations of Scheme could perform better than other Lisp systems, and competitively with implementations of programming languages, such as C and BLISS, which are usually considered to be inherently more efficient than Lisp on conventional machine architectures. Much of this occurs via an optimizing compiler named Orbit.

T contains some features that modern Scheme lacks. For example, T is object-oriented, and it has first-class environments, called locales, which can be modified non-locally and used as a module system. T has several extra special forms for lazy evaluation and flow control, and an equivalent to Common Lisp's setf. T, like Scheme, supports call-with-current-continuation (call/cc), but it also has a more limited form called catch. From the T manual, a hypothetical implementation of cons could be:

(define-predicatepair?)(define-settable-operation(car pair))(define-settable-operation(cdr pair))(define (cons the-carthe-cdr)(objectnil((pair? self)t)((car self)the-car)((cdr self)the-cdr)(((settercar)selfnew-car)(setthe-carnew-car))(((settercdr)selfnew-cdr)(setthe-cdrnew-cdr))))

This example shows that objects in T are intimately related to closures and message-passing. A primitive called join puts two objects together, allowing for something resembling inheritance.

Ports

T was ported to many hardware platforms and operating systems, including: [2]

See also

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References

  1. Slade, Stephen (1987). The T programming language : a dialect of LISP. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ISBN   978-0-13-881905-7. OCLC   16094677.
  2. Campbell, Taylor `Riastradh' (7 April 2006). "T Revival Project". Mumble.net. Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Archived from the original on 2007-01-03. Retrieved 2018-11-18.