Nickle: Language Principles And Pragmatics

Nickle is a vaguely C-like programming language for numerical applications, useful both as a desk calculator and as a prototyping and implementation language for numerical and semi-numerical algorithms. Nickle abstracts a number of useful features from a wide variety of other programming languages, particularly functional languages. Nickle's design principles and implementation pragmatics mesh nicely to form a language filling a useful niche in the UNIX software environment. The history of Nickle is also an instructive example of the migration of an application from an idea to a freely-available piece of software.