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[Useless Programming Language Trivia] The built-in "Prout" function translates directly to "fart" in french. But of course french people managed to come up with a language named Coq so I guess things are even.

I always heard that Coq was revenge for 'bit'.

Weird. I was just reading the HN history of my uni [1], and a quite popular Haskell-looking language they built that was centred on exactly that [2].

I've heard absolutely stunning reviews of the subject it was taught in, Programming with Patterns.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=uts.edu.au

[2] https://bondi.it.uts.edu.au/

Are there docs for Bondi available online? I'd love to take a look at the design of it without DLing the tarball

Yep! Basically everything has been deleted but it's on archive.org.

[1] "Pattern matching" introduction - https://web.archive.org/web/20091202232434/http://www-staff....

[2] "Programming with patterns" presentation - https://bondi.it.uts.edu.au/defun.pdf

[3] "Organizing the world’s structured information" a talk given to Google about bondi - https://web.archive.org/web/20090731102349/http://www-staff.... ... and the sample files https://web.archive.org/web/20120322185006/http://www-staff....

[4] The bondi source. http://bondi.it.uts.edu.au/bondi-2.0/

was interested, clicked through to the project homepage. Everything is in russian :(

edit: some of the site is translated to english edit2: dead links everywhere, I've found this page to explain further with some examples http://www.refal.net/english/xmlref_1.htm#1.%20Wanted:%20a%2...

It's difficult to find resources about Refal in English, but you can find some with a little digging. Here's a nice introduction presentation about Refal and some use cases for it: http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/intro-to-refal-130314.pdf

Try searching for papers/articles by Turchin (who invented Refal). Also, many papers on supercompilers or supercompilation use Refal or a Refal-like language, so they can be another good source of information. (Plus, supercompilation is fascinating to learn about in general -- it's basically using machine learning within the compiler to perform powerful optimizations.)

Additional resources:

* http://pat.keldysh.ru/~roman/doc/Turchin/1980-Turchin--The_L...

* http://refal.botik.ru/book/html/index.html

* http://www.refal.org/doc/turchin/dag/dag.html

* http://rfp.botik.ru/rfp

I've been crawling all the pages still alive on t his theme since the post, I've stumbled on the refal+ reference [0] and a presentation post on the language [1] but couldn't find much more useful docs. Anything you can share will be appreciated this has piqued my interest in a big way! I'll keep an eye on this thread & wiki for anything you can share

[0] http://wiki.botik.ru/twiki/pub/Refaldevel/Download/RefalPlus... [1] http://www.math.bas.bg/bantchev/place/refal.html

Superoptimization is not machine learning - it's brute forcing a small problem space to find patterns that can be implemented in compiler. Where did you get that it was machine learning? Unless you consider all back propagation to be 'machine learning'?

Superoptimization is not the same thing as supercompilation.

yea the supercompilation stuff is very cool. there is a more accessible way to get many of the benefits of supercompilation using things more like type systems, including partial evaluation: http://www.ymeme.com/hackers-introduction-partial-evaluation... http://cs.au.dk/~danvy/tdpe-ln.pdf http://www.readscheme.org/partial-eval/appl_pe.html

To spare you the site crawling in russian with broken links all over, this is what seem to be the "latest" implementations:

refal6 on java 2(!!), seems inactive for ~10y http://www.refal.org/~arklimov/refal6/refal-j.htm

refal+ for VS c++ 2005(?), last activity 2009 http://rfp.botik.ru/home

The Refal programming language