Slogan is a programming language designed for high-performance concurrent, networked applications. It features first-class functions, lexical scoping and operations on structured data like strings, lists, arrays, sets and hash tables. It allows users to dynamically create any number of concurrent tasks and to take full advantage of modern multi-core computers. Its powerful data, control and syntactic abstraction capabilities makes Slogan a language whose extensibility is limited only by your imagination.
Some of the ideals that guided the design of Slogan are explained in the following sections. After that we will have a general discussion on the purpose and content of this book.
Slogan is a dynamically and strongly typed language. This means Slogan has strict type rules that are enforced at runtime. Dynamic typing enable programming in the widest possible variety of styles. Integration of software components developed and compiled separately becomes a trivial matter. Dynamic typing makes it easy to turn ideas into executable programs at a fast pace. Once developed and tested, a Slogan program can be compiled to efficient machine code that runs at full speed on the host platform.
Designing a clear and concise solution to a problem requires selecting the right paradigm. This may be hard or even impossible in languages that prefer one programming style over others. Slogan integrates many programming styles in a well-factored way. The different paradigms are not stacked together haphazardly. Instead, they are integrated in a simple model of function definition and application. Slogan treats functions as first-class entities. Just by mastering this single concept a programmer can write functional, imperative or object-based programs.
This does not mean that you are limited to using only a fixed number of programming styles. Slogan allows you to design and build abstractions to control the program's flow and syntax. So if you feel your favorite paradigm is missing from the language, go ahead and add it! As a practical example, later in this book we will show you how to transform Slogan into a language that can perform backtracking computations.
Concurrency is generally seen as difficult to get right, thanks to its inherent nondeterminism. Slogan have features that enable the specification of concurrent computations in a declarative way. This makes it possible to apply simple and intuitive reasoning techniques to concurrent programs. You can organize your concurrent and parallel programs as a collection of message-passing components. More traditional concurrency with shared memory is also possible.
Slogan is a practical language that is easy to learn and use. Slogan has all the required facilities for integrating seamlessly with the outside world. There are full-featured libraries for communicating with other processes running on the same machine or on the same network. The Foreign Function Interface makes it possible to call C library functions without special proxy code. The interpreter helps with fast development and debugging, while the compiler and the packaging system enable software to be distributed as stand-alone executables or dynamically loadable libraries.
This book is designed to help the reader learn how to program in Slogan. It is divided into three parts. PART I is a tutorial on the language. Here all major language features are introduced and discussed with the help of suitable code examples. In PART II we build even larger programs that demonstrate how the various features of the language can be effectively used to solve interesting and practical problems. PART III is a detailed reference on the standard library and tools.
This is not an introductory book on programming. It's assumed that you are familiar with one or more languages like C, Java, Python or Lisp. It is also assumed that you know how to use the command-line interface and tools usually associated with UNIX like operating systems.
I hope you find great joy programming in Slogan!
Please visit the Slogan website to download and install Slogan.