HomeManualTopicsTypesSymbols

Funky

Funky is an all-purpose (pure) functional and object oriented programming language. It can be used to write small scripts, application programs and just about any software that does not rely on direct access to hardware.

One of the design goals was to create a language suited to create large software projects in the realm of classical artificial intelligence (e.g. "expert systems").

But meanwhile AI systems based on neural networks had an unimaginable boost. To accomodate this new development an interface to use LLMs (Large Language Models) is planned for the near future.

Funky makes it easy to write comprehensible software and at the same time allows the utilization of the vast amount of execution units of modern computers. The logical flow of control is always sequential. The functional design of the language makes it easy for the compiler and runtime system to exploit the lack of side effects to compute function results in parallel at a very fine grained level.

Funky uses an indentation based syntax for all multi-line language constructs including string literals and remarks.

It has a very simple syntax for defining anonymous functions which are widely used. There are no keywords and no "special forms".

Function calls (the only kind of "statement" in Funky) can be written in several ways that make their semantic intention more clear.

There are no loop- or branch-statements; they are replaced by recursion and polymorphic function calls.

Variables have lexical scope but dynamic lifetime.

To ease arithmetic and logic operations, C-style operators (+, -, &&, >>, etc.) are supported as syntactic sugar.

Funky supports completely separate compilation of source code modules. To compile a module no other file than the module's source code file has to be consulted.

As a functional language Funky uses value semantics. So no object can ever be modified, but new objects can be derived from existing ones. This prevents problems like deep vs. shallow copies, equality vs. identity and offers uniform semantics for copying and updating.

The typing discipline of Funky is dynamic but it does not support duck typing and arguments are not converted automatically (so Funky uses strong typing). Funky compilers should test for potential runtime errors at compile time wherever possible.

The use of dynamic variables makes Funky well suited for parallel execution.

Funky offers uniform access to functions, data structures, methods and attributes - they are all function calls in Funky. So the implementation can be changed later on without the need to change the interface.

The definitions of methods and attributes for any specific object can be distributed over several source code modules. An application program can add (private or global) methods and attributes to a prototype object defined in a library.

Funky guarantees determinism: a program run on the same stream of input data will always produce the same stream of output data. This makes debugging Funky programs quite easy. All input events can be logged and a post mortem debugger can replay these events and allow the user to run his program forwards and backwards in small or large steps.

Funky allows defining objects and their parts in any order. Everything that can be resolved will be resolved!