The Hope Machine

The purely functional programming language Hope is a notation for writing programs in the form of expressions. Hope is a very simple language and at the same time contains all the important features of functional languages.

It's a perfect language for learning functional programming in a relaxed, fun and easy way.

Using this interpreter the computer is made to evaluate Hope programs, a machine whose basic operations are those of Hope.

You are invited to begin your exploration of functional programming, and even if you are experienced at functional programming you will still enjoy programming with Hope.

The beginning of Hope was on computer architectures other than Windows, the version of Hope you will find on this web site is an open source project specifically for the Windows platform.
Very minor changes have been made to the original language but to be more specific the version on this site is actually "Hope for Windows". This is a 32-bit application and has been tested on Windows XP and 64-bit Windows 7.

Just download the hope.zip file, unzip it, ( it contains only two files hope.exe and Standard.hop ) ensure they sit in the same folder when running. Have fun.

For historical purposes IC-HOPE version 4.0 (Imperial College Hope) is also available. This version of Hope was originally written and compiled at the Dept. of Computer Science, Imperial College London, who gave permission for its distribution for educational purposes.
It is an old DOS program and will only work on x86 computers. The ichope.zip contains two files ichope.exe and init.hop keep them in the same folder when running.