A Language for Compositional Programming: a Rationale and Design

A rationale and description of a language for exploratory and educational programming in a compositional style is presented. By ‘compositional’ a functional programming style is meant where the computation is a hierarchy of function compositions and applications. One of the datatypes of the language is that of the geometrical figures that can be obtained by simple rules of spatial correlation, thus, too, forming hierarchical compositions. The language is strongly influenced by GeomLab, but differs from it substantially in many respects. The paper discusses the main features of the language; the detailed description along with the picture construction facilities will be presented in an accompanying publication.