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The Next 700 Programming Languages Alive

The Next 700 Programming Languages
KindPaper
Published1966
StatusAlive
AuthorsPeter Landin
FieldProgramming languages
Sourcehomepages.inf.ed.ac.uk ↗

ISWIM — the language that exists only in this paper — proposed lambda calculus with syntactic sugar, invented 'syntactic sugar,' and predicted seven hundred descendants. ML and Haskell are among them.

Created by Peter Landin

Published in CACM in March 1966, the paper introduced ISWIM ('If you See What I Mean') — not a language to implement but a framework of '700 languages' sharing one abstract core: lambda calculus underneath, imperative-looking sugar on top, with the offside rule for layout.

Landin coined 'syntactic sugar' and 'syntactic saccharin' here, and his where-clauses prefigured ML's let-expressions. ML, Miranda, and Haskell are ISWIM's direct descendants; the paper is still the deepest single argument that language design is sugar over semantics.

Sources

  1. homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/papers-we-love/landin-next-700.pdf
  2. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365230.365257
  3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Landin