The Functional C Experience

A functional programming language can be taught successfully as a First language, but if there is no follow up the students do not appreciate the functional approach. Following discussions concerning this issue at the 1995 FPLE conf. we decided to develop such a follow up by writing a book that teaches C to students who can write simple functional programs. This paper summarises the essence of our approach, which is based on program transformation, and presents our experience teaching functional C at the Universities of Southampton and Bristol