Hume (programming Language)

Hume (programming Language)

Hume is a functionally based programming language developed at the University of St Andrews and Heriot-Watt University in Scotland since the year 2000. The language name is both an acronym meaning 'Higher-order Unified Meta-Environment' and an honorific to the 18th Century philosopher David Hume. It targets real-time embedded systems, aiming to produce a design that is both highly abstract, yet which will still allow precise extraction of time and space execution costs. This allows programmers to guarantee the bounded time and space demands of executing programs.

Hume is unusual in combining functional programming ideas with ideas from finite state automata. Automata are used to structure communicating programs into a series of "boxes", where each box maps inputs to outputs in a purely functional way using high-level pattern-matching. It is also unusual in being structured as a series of levels, each of which exposes different machine properties.