Haskell is a general purpose, purely functional programming language, designed by a 15-member international committee, and named after the logician Haskell B. Curry. The committee was formed because it was felt that research and application of modern functional languages were being hampered by the lack of a common language. The design was completed in April 1990, and has been very well received both inside and outside the functional programming community. Naturally, there is a great need for a good, robust, and freely available implementation of Haskell. The Yale Haskell implementation has the potential to serve this role, it being based on years of functional language implementation experience at Yale, and being the most comprehensive implementation of Haskell currently available supporting both compiled and interpreted code, separate compilation, and program development tools. However, Yale Haskell needs further support to be truly effective and this award provides that support. Maintaining such a system is not an easy task, and falls more in the category of software maintenance than research. Because of the rapid growth of functional programming, the demand for an effective and reliable implementation of Haskell, and the lack of other implementations as comprehensive, necessitates support for Yale Haskell. The goals are to stabilize, maintain, distribute, and improve the implementation.
