Kaya (programming language)

This article is about the programming language. For other uses, see Kaya.

Kaya

Appeared in	2004
Designed by	Edwin Brady
Developer	Durham University Computing Society
Stable release	0.5.1 (August 2, 2008)
Typing discipline	static, strong, inferred
Major implementations	Kaya
Influenced by	Haskell, Objective Caml, C
OS	Windows, Mac OS, Linux, others
License	GNU GPL license
Website	kayalang.org

Kaya is a programming language with a powerful type system, static type checking and type inference.

Overview

Kaya is a compiled language with a powerful and unobtrusive type system, allowing many bugs to be found at compile time. Type inference means that the need to explicitly write types down is minimised, while polymorphic records and functions, together with ad-hoc function overloading, allow easy writing of general functions.

Kaya allows functions to be partially applied, with the remaining parameters completed later. This allows easy development of generalised functions, evaluation of expensive functions to be postponed until necessary, and separation of program code into logical chunks to be done without sacrificing efficiency. Anonymous functions (lambda functions) are also supported.

Kaya includes extensive pattern matching capabilities, allowing analysis of complex data structures and extraction of needed variables to be expressed more readably than via a sequence of nested if statements. Complex data types may be aliased to type synonyms, to improve the readability of code, and to allow for implementation changes.

There are several primitive types, including automatically sized multi-dimensional arrays. There is a large standard library containing modules for processing user input, database access with a cross-database API, image generation with libgd, regular expressions and many features for web development.

Implementation

Kaya is cross-platform, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, and should work on any other POSIX-compliant system. Programs written in Kaya can be compiled on any of these operating systems, and can run on a wide variety of hardware architectures.

Other features

• Automatic garbage collection via libgc
• Foreign functions interface to call C libraries
• Exception handling
• A module system
• Usable as a scripting language with '#!' line

External links

• Kaya website