Miranda

Miranda, daughter of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, is an intelligent young woman who has never known any men besides her father and Caliban---their hideous beast-man servant. When Prospero uses magic to lure a ship to his island Miranda falls in love with the first man she sees...

Their love is (perhaps) the only event in the play that is not orchestrated by Prospero's magic...

Miranda is a character from the comic strip userfriendly. She is a babe, a unix admin and quake god. The strip is very funny and consists of such characters as dust puppy, crud puppy, and many others. The strip also has a large community following in the way of UFies.

(Astronomy)

Miranda is a small satellite orbiting Uranus. Its diameter of only 470 kilometers (290 miles). It was discovered by Gerard Peter Kuiper in 1948.

Its surface is unlike anything in the solar system, with features that seem jumbled together more or less randomly. Miranda consists of huge fault canyons as deep as 20 kilometers (12 miles), terraced layers and a mixture of old and young surfaces.

Multiple theories exist as to why this is the case, although no conclusion has been reached yet. The younger regions might have been produced by incomplete differentiation of the moon, a process in which upwelling of lighter material surfaced in limited areas. Alternatively, scientists believe that Miranda may have been shattered as many as five times during its evolution. After each shattering the moon would have reassembled from the remains of its former self with portions of the core exposed and portions of the surface buried.

Miranda - A Functional Language

History

Miranda is a functional programming language built for the UNIX environment. Developed between 1985 and 1986 by David Turner, Miranda was designed to produce a commercial version of a standard non-strict purely functional language. (Purists will note that it is pretty difficult to get a purely functional language, see referential transparency).

Uses

Miranda is an archaic language, and in the shadow of the mighty Haskell, has degenerated to a mere teaching language. But, in its prime, it was used:

• for rapid prototyping
• as a specification language
• for research into functional programming
• as a general purpose programming tool

Structure

Miranda is composed of some fairly basic data types:

num : Numbers, Miranda's basic number type is similar to the real number types in other languages.
char : Characters, single characters, such as 'A', 'a', '.' or '6'.
bool : Boolean, true or false.

Tuples : Sets of non-homogeneously typed values.
Lists : Sets of homogeneously typed values. Miranda can have lists of infinite length.

New types can be defined as follws:

string == [char]

(List of characters)

Functions are defined in this form:

FunctionName :: InputType1 -> InputType2 ->..-> InputTypeN -> OutputType
FunctionName Arg1 Arg2..ArgN = Statement

Notice functions can only EVER produce a single value as a result. However, this value can be a list. All functions in Miranda are curried (see: Currying Functions).

Example

Using recursion:

>greenbottles :: num -> string
>greenbottles 0 		= 	"no green bottles standing on the wall.\n"
>greenbottles (x+1) 	= 	show (x+1) ++ " green bottles standing on the wall.\n" ++
>				show (x+1) ++ " green bottles standing on the wall,\n" ++
>				"and if one green bottle, should accidentally fall,\n" ++
>				"there'll be " ++ greenbottles x

Alternatives

A PC friendly version of Miranda is available, called "Amanda", and was developed by Dick Bruin.

For more info...

Information on Miranda is very hard to come by, as it is living in the shadows of the functional programming world. Haskell dominates, simply because it is more powerful. Everything that can be done in Miranda can be done in Haskell. Haskell also has Monads. However, because of it's limited functionality, Miranda does make a good teaching langauge. Take it from me, I had to learn about functional programming through Miranda on my University course.

Try here for some limited inforamtion about the Miranda language:http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/miranda/miranda.html

Dick Bruin's homepage was last seen here:
http://www.engineering.tech.nhl.nl/engineering/personeel/bruin/