Department of Computer Science
MiraCalc

MiraCalc is a program used for supporting the teaching of functional programming (in Miranda). It was developed by Doug Goldson , Mike Hopkins and Steve Reeves .

MiraCalc grew out of an attempt to help people learn about functional programming. It is designed to support them in writing and understanding the Miranda scripts that they typically write as part of the process of learning Miranda.

The name "MiraCalc" (Miranda Calculator) comes about from reflecting on the way that we intend people will use it, i.e. in the same way as one might use an arithmetic or scientific calculator, except that instead of calculating with numbers, our calculator works with Miranda expressions.

We hope that people will experiment with MiraCalc and use it to explore and learn about Miranda.

The calculations of which MiraCalc is capable are of three sorts:

A tutorial on the use of MiraCalc is given in Goldson, D., Hopkins, M. and Reeves, S. (1994) MiraCalc: The Miranda Calculator, The Unix Version . Working paper 94/5, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ.

The version of MiraCalc described in this paper is available in this file, but read this short document first.

A paper describing the project within which MiraCalc was developed is described in Reeves, S., Goldson, D., Fung, P., O'Shea, T., Hopkins, M. and Bornat, R. (1995) The Calculator Project - Formal Reasoning about Programs, Proceedings of SRIG-ET'94, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp.166-173.

A further paper on MiraCalc and the project it grew out of is given in Goldson, D. (1994) A Symbolic Calculator for Non-Strict Functional Programs , The Computer Journal, Vol. 37, no. 3, 1994.


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