Are purely functional programming systems academic toys, or can they be successfully used for demanding applications? Do claims of expressive power and amenability to parallel execution apply only to small scale exercises, or to realistic problems? The FLARE project addressed such questions by means of practical experiments, developing several applications. Our partners were British Telecom and the Universities of Glasgow, Kent and Swansea.
The book referenced below describes several of the applications, along with some of the implementation tools and techniques used.
Applications of Functional Programming, Colin Runciman and David Wakeling (eds.), UCL Press, 1995.
The advantages claimed for functional programming - power of expression, ease of reasoning about programs, amenability to parallel execution - are well rehearsed. Geometric modelling is a complex field of application which is computationally demanding both internally and with respect to graphical I/O. It stands in need of all the above-mentioned advantages.
A sequential version of an experimental 2D geometric modeller has been developed using Haskell. The modeller is based on the Binary Space Partitioning Tree (BSPT) representation of objects. We have also attempted to run parallel versions of the BSPT modeller (with source annotations to aid the parallel compiler) on Glasgow's GRIP machine.