Welcome to the Dictionary of Programming Languages, a compendium of computer coding methods assembled to provide information and aid your appreciation for computer science history.

Browse the dictionary by clicking on a section:
       A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  JK  L  M  N  O  P  QR  S  T  UV  WXYZ+ 

Get a full dump of the dictionary:
       List of Names      Short Form      Full Form

NIAL

Language type:

F - Functional or lambda-based

Description:

NIAL, the nested interactive array language, is a quasi-functional language with some procedural features. It is intended for application development.
Nial offers high-level features intended to make it easy for the programmer to build complex data structures and analysis functions. The primitive data types in Nial includes integers, reals, strings, and atoms. The primary aggregate data types is the rectangular array. Arrays can be heterogenous, dynamic, and built up in a variety of ways.
Nial supports conventional procedural control-flow constructs like while loops and conditional expressions. Various functional programming constructs like currying, transformers, and composition are also supported.
Nial was originally designed and implemented at Queen's University in Ontario, CA. It is now developed and sold by NIAL Systems Limited. The company offers free evaluation downloads.

Origin:

M. A. Jenkins et al, Queen's University Ontario, 1981-86.

See Also:

Lisp    FP    S    Yorick    APL    Mathematica   

Remarks:

One of the design goals of Nial was to use simple laws and identities with consistent properties that always hold true. This precision, together with Nial's nested control structures and powerful array operators, is supposed to make Nial programs compact and easy to explain. Like any very powerful, compact language (e.g. APL) the programs can sometimes get very dense and opaque.
The Q'Nial system is a portable interactive interpreter for Nial; it can be considered analogous to a Mathematica 'notebook' or an S session.

Links:

About NIAL (introduction)

NIAL Free Evaluation download area

Date:

Last updated 1/6/98

Sample code:

# A routine to look for HTML tags in a
# file (from the AboutNial page at NIAL Systems)
 findtagtext IS OPERATION Text {
   Hdposns := `< findall Text; 
   Tlposns := `> findall Text;
   Lengths := Tlposns - Hdposns + 1;
   Tags := Hdposns EACHBOTH + EACH tell Lengths EACHLEFT choose Text;
   Hdposns Tags }

 test is op fnm {
    findtagtext readfield fnm 0 (filelength fnm) }

 Posns Tags := test "intro.htm;

Descriptions in this dictionary are ©1997-99 Neal Ziring. Some examples copyright of their respective authors. Some technologies and languages are trademarked. Permission to copy descriptions is granted as long as authorship credit is preserved.

Comments on this dictionary, corrections and suggestions, are all welcome. Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com