Novel Functional-Imperative Programming Language El: A Brief Introduction

The paper discusses the tendency of interpenetration of ideas and technologies of functional and imperative paradigms of programming in their modern implementation. A new functional-imperative programming language El is proposed, which in many respects resembles the functional language of Erlang, but differs from it by some features. A brief introduction to the lexis, syntax and semantics of El is given. Its main distinguishing features and characteristics are distinguished: pure functions, first and higher order functions, anonymous functions, closures, function signature overload, garbage collection at the moment of return from the function, imperative principle of operations execution in the body of the function, high-level data types and operations with them, variability of static and dynamic typing as well as the immutability of variables by the choice of the programmer, the availability of primitive and object types of data, brevity, simplicity and convenience of control structures, the possibility of an explicit cycles programming instead of the more expensive recursive function calls, which, however, can also be used. A typical structure of a file containing a program module is described, a list and purpose of its sections, definitions of functions, and all kinds of control language operators are given. A summary of significant distinctive characteristics of the language is given. The current state of the development and implementation of the program translator from the El language for different target platforms using the LLVM compiler infrastructure is described.