Alice (programming language)

Alice, often called Alice ML, is a general-purpose, high-level, multi-paradigm functional programming language designed by the Programming Systems Laboratory at Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany. It is a dialect of Standard ML, extended with support for lazy evaluation, concurrency through multithreading, distributed computing by remote procedure calls, and constraint programming. Its concurrency rests on a future type, a value supplied by an independent thread, which blocks any thread that reads it until the computation is finished; a related promise lets one thread hand a future value to another, and both are used to synchronize data flow. Unlike Haskell, which is lazy by default, Alice evaluates eagerly by default and needs an explicit statement to evaluate lazily. The Saarland implementation runs on the Simple Extensible Abstract Machine virtual machine, is free software, and compiles just in time to bytecode and to native x86 code. Early versions ran on the virtual machine of the Mozart Programming System for Oz, which allowed Alice and Oz code to interoperate.