CAL programming language

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CAL is the name of two unrelated programming languages.

[edit] CAL (Joss family)

CAL (Conversational Algebraic Language) was a programming language and system designed and developed by Butler Lampson at Berkeley in 1967.

The design of CAL was based on JOSS but had new features and was implemented on the SDS 940. Lampson states that "many of its techniques were adopted by Tymshare for their interactive SuperBasic system".[1]

[edit] CAL (Quark Framework)

CAL is also the name of a language originally developed by Business Objects and now released as "Open Quark", with sources, under a BSD-style license. It is a lazy functional programming language similar to the Haskell programming language. An implementation is available from the Business Objects Labs site. CAL forms part of the Quark Framework which includes a visual programming tool, Gem Cutter.

One of the main objectives of the Quark Framework is to allow logic expressed in a declarative, lazy functional style to be easily and efficiently integrated into Java applications. CAL source is typically compiled directly to byte codes (though an interpreter is also available), and can be called from regular OO code. In turn CAL code can call any Java code. Evaluation of CAL programs, and exploration of results can be completely controlled by procedural code, allowing data transformation logic (for which CAL is ideally suited) to be flexibly integrated into Java applications. A Java program can also easily build new functions on-the-fly, to describe transient data flows, or to create persisted logic. This form of 'functional metaprogramming' is common in real-world deployments of the Quark Framework.

For further details, refer to the main CAL and the Quark Framework page.