The functional programming language Miranda has been used as a first programming language at the University of NSW since the beginning of 1989, when a new computer engineering course and a revised computer science course were introduced. This paper explains the reasons for choosing the language, and describes the subject in which Miranda is introduced. Examples of the presentation of the material, and of exercises and assignment used in the course, are given. Finally, an assessment of the experience is given.

A functional language, Miranda, is being used on an introductory programming course for business students. This paper describes the rationale for such a course and choice of language. An application in the area of operations management, which is used in teaching, is given as an example of the benefits of using a functional language in this area. The reaction of the students and staff to this (for them) new paradigm of programming is described. Some conclusions are drawn for computing education for non-specialists.

In the period 1986–1991, experiments have been carried out with an introductory course in computer programming, based on functional programming. Due to thorough educational design and evaluation, a successful course has been developed. This has led to a revision of the computer programming education in the first year of the computer science curriculum at the University of Twente.

This article describes the approach, the aim of the computer programming course, the outline and subject matter of the course, and the evaluation. Educational research has been done to assess the quality of the course.

This survey presents information concerning the use of functional languages (both strict and non-strict) for teaching in higher education. It lists the languages used by over 70 different institutions, the years in which the courses are given, and the recommended textbooks.

In this paper we describe an implementation of an interactive version of the purely functional programming language Lazy ML (LML). The most remarkable fact about the interactive system is that it is written in a pure functional style using LML, yet the efficiency still compares favourably to other conventional interpretative systems.

We describe how the system is designed, and also the exception mechanism that was added to facilitate the handling of errors in the system.

Most programming environments for functional languages offer a single tool used to evaluate programs – either a batch compiler or an interpreter with a read-eval-print loop. This paper presents a programming environment that supports not only evaluation, but also a range of other programming activities including transformation. The environment is designed to encourage working in an incremental and exploratory style, avoiding constraints on the order in which things must be done yet guarenteeing security. What has already been done towards the development of a program automatically persists, as does information about what has yet to be done. For instance, new laws can be introduced as conjectures and used in program transformation, but full details of proof obligations and dependencies are maintained.

The paper outlines the functional language supported by the environment, and uses an extended example to illustrate program construction, execution, tracing, modification and transformation.