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Haskelite: A Step-By-Step Interpreter for Teaching Functional Programming

Author Pedro Vasconcelos

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Author Details

Pedro Vasconcelos
  • Departamento de Ciência de Computadores, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Portugal
  • LIACC - Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial e Ciência de Computadores, Porto, Portugal

Funding

This work was financially supported by: Base Funding - UIDB/00027/2020 of the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory - LIACC - funded by national funds through the FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC).

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Sandra Alves for helpful feedback on a earlier draft of this paper.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Pedro Vasconcelos. Haskelite: A Step-By-Step Interpreter for Teaching Functional Programming. In 4th International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2023). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 112, pp. 12:1-12:8, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.ICPEC.2023.12

Abstract

This paper describes Haskelite, a step-by-step interpreter for a small subset of Haskell. Haskelite is designed to help teach fundamental concepts of functional programming, namely: evaluation by rewriting; definition of functions using pattern-matching; recursion; higher-order functions; and on-demand evaluation. The interpreter is implemented in Elm and compiled to JavaScript, so it runs on the browser and requires no installation. This is on-going work and has yet to be fully evaluated; we present some initial experience in the classroom and highlight some points for improvement.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Functional languages
  • Information systems → Web applications
  • Software and its engineering → Interpreters
Keywords
  • Functional programming
  • Step-by-step evaluators
  • Web applications

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