🚀 go-pugleaf

A friend and I are planning to do an implementation of Poly this spring to 
serve as a basis for experimenting with polymorphism.  We are interested
in hearing from people with experience or interest in the implementation
of polymorphic programming languages, Poly in particular.  We would be
estatic to hear from someone willing to share the source to an implementation
of Poly and TAM :-) !!!  We would be equally happy to hear from those
who may have fallen into black holes trying to implement a polymorphic 
language.

For those of you unfamiliar with Poly, it is an extremly regular language
designed with strict adhearence to the principles of Completeness,
Correspondence, Scope, and Orthogonality.  Names are bound to locations, 
and locations can hold characters, integers, procedures, lists, functions, 
booleans, types, vectors, structures, structure fields, and enumerates.  
Locations can be type constant or type variable, value constant or value 
variable.  All values in the language are "first class" values, eg. they 
can be assigned, built into data structures, or passed as parameters and 
returned as the result of a function (NOTE: this includes functions and 
procedures).  

Poly runs on a high level, abstract machine called TAM (tagged 
architecture model) designed to provide features needed to simplify
the implementation of Poly.  TAM provides constancy, polymorphism,
user-defined types, orthogonal data structures, and field selectors
and routines as assignable values.

For more information see:
Articles by Hamish Gunn and David Harland in "Software--Practice and
Experience" vol 14, num 10 and 11 (Oct. and Nov. 1984).

"Polymorphic Programming Languages", by David Harland, Ellis Harwood Ltd
and John Wiley, Chichester, 1984.

Norman Graham
Oklahoma State University
Computing and Information Sciences
219 Mathematical Sciences Building
Stillwater, OK  74078-0599

CSNet:  norman@a.cs.okstate.edu