pltinius

Pltinius is a fictional programming language intended for education and research. It presents a minimalist design to explore compiler structure, type systems, and concurrent semantics. The language is described in academic articles and online tutorials as a tool for experimenting with features such as type inference, generics, and safe concurrency.

Design and features: It supports both functional and imperative paradigms. Types are statically checked with inference, and an optional type annotation can be supplied. It includes a lightweight concurrency model based on actors and message passing. The runtime is garbage-collected and aims to be predictable for teaching purposes.

Syntax and semantics: The syntax is described as a hybrid between functional and imperative styles, allowing concise function definitions, pattern matching, and list comprehensions. It emphasizes readability and beginner-friendliness while enabling advanced features for research.

Example: A simple map function and its use: def map(f, xs): return [f(x) for x in xs] def inc(n): return n + 1 map(inc, [1, 2, 3])

History and status: pltinius originated in educational contexts as a vehicle for illustrating compiler pipelines, type systems, and concurrent abstractions. It has no standardized specification or widespread production use, though several teaching repositories and toy implementations exist for classroom experiments.

See also: Haskell, OCaml, Rust, Scala, Julia.