Limbo (programming language)

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Limbo
Paradigm	Concurrent
Appeared in	1995
Designed by	Sean Dorward, Phil Winterbottom, and Rob Pike
Developer	Bell Labs/Vita Nuova Holdings
Typing discipline	Strong
Major implementations	Dis virtual machine
Influenced by	C, CSP, Alef
Influenced	Stackless Python
OS	Inferno
License	Open Source
Website	http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html

Limbo is a programming language for writing distributed systems and is the language used to write applications for the Inferno operating system. It was designed at Bell Labs by Sean Dorward, Phil Winterbottom, and Rob Pike. The Limbo compiler generates architecture-independent object code which is then interpreted by the Dis virtual machine or compiled just before runtime to improve performance. Therefore all Limbo applications are completely portable across all Inferno platforms. Limbo's approach to concurrency was inspired by Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).

1 Language features
2 Examples
- 2.1 Hello world
3 Books
4 See also
5 External links

Language features

Limbo supports the following features:

modular programming
concurrent programming
strong type checking at compile- and run-time
interprocess communication over typed channels
automatic garbage collection
simple abstract data types.

Examples

Limbo uses Pascal style definitions (minus the VAR keyword) as in:

name := type value;
name0,name1 : type = value;
name2,name3 : type;
name2 = value;

Hello world

implement Command;

include "sys.m";
    sys: Sys;

include "draw.m";

include "sh.m";

init(nil: ref Draw->Context, nil: list of string)
{
    sys = load Sys Sys->PATH;
    sys->print("Hello World!\n");
}

Books

The 3rd edition of the Inferno operating system and Limbo programming language are described in the textbook Inferno Programming with Limbo ISBN 0470843527 (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), by Phillip Stanley-Marbell. Another textbook "The Inferno Programming Book: An Introduction to Programming for the Inferno Distributed System", by Martin Atkins, Charles Forsyth, Rob Pike and Howard Trickey, was started, but never released.