Development of a Prototype Geometric Modelling System using a Functional Language

The world outside of academia lacks large scale real examples of applications written in functional programming languages. This technical report considers the development of one such application, a Geometric Modelling System. The core of the report describes the application in some depth. The report concludes with an appraisal of the results and considers the appropriateness of the functional programming style. 1 Introduction The advantages claimed of the functional programming style over the conventional imperative style are now well rehearsed [Jon84] [Hug89] [Hud89]. Even so functional languages have only flourished in the laboratories of academia. This fact is currently being addressed by the FLARE project. "The effectiveness of functional programming has been amply demonstrated on a laboratory scale and it is now appropriate to scale up the experiments with a view to encouraging the wider community of applications developers to embrace this technology." --- FLARE project proposal ..