A♯ (Axiom)
| Paradigm | functional |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Richard Dimick Jenks, Barry Trager, Stephen M. Watt, James Davenport, Robert Sutor, Scott Morrison |
| Developer | IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center |
| Platform | Cross-platform (multi-platform) (16, 32, and 64 bit): RS/6000, SPARC, Alpha, IA-32, Intel 286, Motorola 680x0, System/370 |
| OS | Cross-platform (multi-platform): Linux, AIX, SunOS, HP-UX, NeXT, Mach, OS/2, DOS, Microsoft Windows, VMS, VM/CMS |
| Filename extensions | .as |
| Website |
axiom-developer |
| Influenced by | |
| Pascal, Haskell | |
| Influenced | |
| Aldor | |
A♯ (A sharp) is an object-oriented functional programming language distributed as a separable component of Version 2 of the Axiom computer algebra system. A# types and functions are first-class values and can be used freely in conjunction with an extensive library of data structures and other mathematical abstractions. A key design guideline for A# was suitability of compilation to portable and efficient machine code.
Development of A# has now switched to the Aldor programming language.
There is both an A# optimising compiler and an A# intermediate code interpreter. The compiler can produce any of:
- stand-alone executable programs
- object libraries in native operating system formats
- portable bytecode libraries
- C source code, or
- Lisp source code.
The following C compilers are supported: gcc, Xlc, Sun Studio Compiler, Borland, Metaware and MIPS C.
References
- Stephen M. Watt; Peter A. Broadbery; Samuel S. Dooley; Pietro Iglio; Scott C. Morrison; Jonathan M. Steinbach; Robert S. Sutor (1994-07-20). "A First Report on the A♯ Compiler" (PDF). IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. p. 7. Retrieved 2013-01-06.
This article is based on material taken from A# at the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.