A Sharp (Axiom)

The correct title of this article is A^♯ (Axiom). It appears incorrectly here because of technical restrictions.

A^♯

Paradigm	multi-paradigm object-oriented functional
Designed by	Richard Dimick Jenks, Barry Trager, Stephen M. Watt, James Davenport, Robert Sutor, Scott Morrison
Developer	IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Platform	Cross-platform (multi-platform) (16, 32, and 64 bit): RS/6000, SPARC, Alpha, IA-32, Intel 286, Motorola 680x0, System/370
OS	Cross-platform (multi-platform): Linux, AIX, SunOS, HP-UX, NeXT, Mach, OS/2, DOS, Microsoft Windows, VMS, VM/CMS
Filename extensions	.as
Website	{{#property:P856}}
Influenced by
Pascal, Haskell
Influenced
Aldor

A^♯ (A sharp) is an object-oriented functional programming language distributed as a separable component of Version 2 of the Axiom computer algebra system. A# types and functions are first-class values and can be used freely in conjunction with an extensive library of data structures and other mathematical abstractions. A key design guideline for A# was suitability of compilation to portable and efficient machine code.

Development of A# has now switched to the Aldor programming language.

There is both an A# optimising compiler and an A# intermediate code interpreter. The compiler can produce any of:

• stand-alone executable programs
• object libraries in native operating system formats
• portable bytecode libraries
• C source code, or
• Lisp source code.

The following C compilers are supported: gcc, Xlc, Sun Studio Compiler, Borland, Metaware and MIPS C.

References

This article is based on material taken from A# at the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.