Escher (programming language)
Escher (named for M. C. Escher, "a master of endless loops") is a declarative programming language that supports both functional programming and logic programming models, developed by J.W. Lloyd in the mid-1990s. It was designed mostly as a research and teaching vehicle. The basic view of programming exhibited by Escher and related languages is that a program is a representation of a theory in some logic framework, and the program's execution (computation) is a deduction from the theory. The logic framework for Escher is Alonzo Church's simple theory of types. Escher, notably, supports I/O  through a monadic type representing the 'outside world', in the style of Haskell. One of the goals of Escher's designers was to support meta-programming, and so the language has comprehensive support for generating and transforming programs. Examples. MODULE Lambda. CONSTRUCT Person/0. FUNCTION Jane, Mary, John: One -> Person. FUNCTION Mother : Person * Person -> Boolean. Mother(x,y) => FUNCTION Wife : Person * Person -> Boolean. Wife(x,y) => FUNCTION PrimitiveRel : (Person * Person -> Boolean) -> Boolean. PrimitiveRel(r) => FUNCTION Rel : (Person * Person -> Boolean) -> Boolean. Rel(r) =>