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Napier88 is an orthogonally persistent
programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...
that was designed and implemented at the
University of St Andrews (Aien aristeuein) , motto_lang = grc , mottoeng = Ever to ExcelorEver to be the Best , established = , type = Public research university Ancient university , endowment ...
,
Scotland Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...
. The primary designer was
Ron Morrison Ron Morrison was the head of School of the computer science department of the University of St. Andrews where he worked on programming languages, inventing S-algol, and coinventing PS-algol and Napier88. He had graduated from St. Andrews wit ...
, whose initial designs were extended and implemented by Fred Brown, Richard Connor, and Al Dearle. Napier88 was ahead of its time in many ways, and was the first robustly implemented language to combine a polymorphic type system with orthogonal persistence. The language was robustly implemented and released to users from both industry and academia; up to 1,000 registered users were recorded in due course. The language, however, was only intended to provide a proof of concept for an experiment in persistent programming; some time after 1989 (the year the first implementation was in fact released) the group's interests moved on and the language was no longer maintained. Its influence lives on in various other systems however; the
CORBA The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sys ...
type ANY is distinctly recognisable in Napier88's type ANY; Microsoft's
Common Language Runtime The Common Language Runtime (CLR), the virtual machine component of Microsoft .NET Framework, manages the execution of .NET programs. Just-in-time compilation converts the managed code (compiled intermediate language code) into machine instruc ...
(CLR) uses a similar polymorphic architecture, and
Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...
's parametric types solve some of the same problems of uninstantiated types escaping from their static scope.


History

Napier88 was the third of a family of languages designed and implemented by Morrison at St Andrews, following on from
S-algol S-algol (St Andrews Algol) is a computer programming language derivative of ALGOL 60 developed at the University of St Andrews in 1979 by Ron Morrison and Tony Davie. The language is a modification of ALGOL to contain orthogonal data types that M ...
and
PS-algol PS-algol is an orthogonally persistent programming language. PS-algol was an extension of the language S-algol implemented by the University of St Andrews and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. S-algol was designed by Ron Morrison and exte ...
.


Further reading

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External links


Description of Napier88 at Univ. of St Andrew's website. Accessed June 21, 2012
Algol programming language family Persistent programming languages {{Prog-lang-stub