Hope (programming language)

Hope is a functional programming language developed in the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh by Rod Burstall, David MacQueen and Don Sannella, first appearing in 1980. It was derived from the earlier NPL language and predates both Miranda and Haskell, developing alongside ML at the same university. Hope is notable for being among the first languages to combine call-by-pattern evaluation with algebraic data types, ideas that influenced later functional language design. Its name honors Sir Thomas Hope, an eighteenth century Scottish agricultural reformer after whom Edinburgh's Hope Park Square is named, rather than describing any property of the language itself. A later dialect, Hope+, extended the original design.