New Language Coming to Visual Studio

A future version of Visual Studio will include F#, a new .NET programming language developed by Microsoft Research and designed to be a hybrid of traditional programming languages and functional programming languages. The latter are particularly well-suited to parallel computing and mathematical operations. Although developers can already download the core F# compiler and tools, full integration with Visual Studio will come after the Visual Studio 2008 release.

Functional Programming Supports Multiple Processors

F# is one of a growing number of functional programming languages, a category which includes Lisp, APL, and Scheme. Interest in functional programming is growing because the design of these languages makes it easier for programs to be split into units that can be executed in parallel. (Many university computer science departments, including the University of California at Berkeley, now use Scheme as their introductory programming language.)

In more traditional imperative, or procedural, languages, such as C++, C#, or Visual Basic, a developer creates a program by assembling a series of instructions that are executed in sequence and that alter the global state of the program. But this programming model requires different components to access shared information, a process that must be synchronized by the developer, which makes it difficult to subdivide a program into tasks that can be executed simultaneously. Developers using procedural languages to create parallel programs must devote much of their time and energy to managing shared state.