[Haskell-beginners] Amanda

[Christiaan Kras]

Hello list,

First time I'm posting here. I've been interested in Haskell for about a 
year now, but sadly haven't done too much with it yet.

I decided to get my bachelors degree in Computer Science/Engineering 
(it's a bit of a mixed course at my university) after having worked for 
over 4.5 years. One of the classes I've got to follow is discrete math.

A first glimpse on the study material made me think "Cool! They're using 
Haskell!". This is however not the case. Instead, we're using Amanda.

Amanda was written by Dick Bruin, who as far as I know used to teach at 
my university, but has now moved on to another university. I was told 
Amanda was being used at my university, NHL Leeuwarden (Netherlands) and 
the University of Twente (Netherlands). (strictly my university isn't a 
university, but high school means something different in English than it 
does in Dutch :-))

The reason I'm posting here is because Amanda seems extremely heavily 
influenced by Haskell. I think it was written in either Delphi or 
Pascal, but I've got to verify that with one of the teachers.

It's quite old as well, as it was developed between 1990 and 2000.

A lot of stuff written in Amanda can easily be converted to Haskell with 
a few small changes. Which makes me wonder why they aren't using Haskell 
now. List comprehensions use the same syntax, but use a semicolon 
instead of a comma for separating generators and terms. Operators such 
as +,/,* etc. are functions, just like they are in Haskell. For what I 
can tell Amanda is more or less a stripped down version of Haskell.

The thing I was wondering though, is if anyone on this list has ever 
heard of Amanda before. If so, where did you got in contact with it?

-- 
Christiaan Kras
http://blog.htbaa.com