Okay.

So, welcome to the SMEI lecture of today.

I apologize for not having a quiz today.

We

still have server problems.

The server is up, but login doesn't work again yet.

So,

I hope this is fixed at some point tomorrow, but we'll see.

Right.

We're starting a new

chapter for today.

We have been hearing or thinking a lot about functions, and now we're

going to look at a programming language that takes functions as the main principle of computation.

So

it's a representative of the programming paradigm of functional programming

which

is ideal for dealing with symbolic data

with tree-like structures and those kind of things.

And for all of you who are experienced imperative programmers

there will be things to unlearn

but it's going to be the programming language we are going to use for the rest of the lecture

just so that you get some exposure to it.

Who of you would consider themselves experienced

in programming?

One, two, three, four, five.

And I'm assuming that all of you are using

imperative programming languages like Java or C or C++.

Is that correct?

Who of you has experience

in functional programming?

And I mean by that more than writing a couple of lines.

One, two,

three.

Good.

So, it will be simpler for you.

If you have no experience whatsoever in programming,

that's also simpler.

Because you have less to unlearn.

It's going to be horrible anyway,

because you have to learn how to program, which is another big step.

But we're going to see about

that.

Okay?

So, functional programming.

In particular, we're going to use a programming

language called standard ML.

I've picked standard ML because it has a relatively clean syntax.

And

unlike other more modern programming languages like C sharp or F sharp

no