AN AUTONOMOUS MULTIMEDIA SUBSYSTEM FOR A FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE

Abstract

Most modern functional language systems provide some limited interfaces to help functional programmers explore the real-world around them However, due to the nature of present-day functional I/O system, this capability is rather limited if compared with imperative counterparts. As multimedia applications involve a wide range of different media types, such as text, image, video, audio, animation and so on, which are intensively dependent on a good support of effective low-level I/O subsystem, there is presently little support for functional programmers to develop practical multimedia applications. One solution to this problem is to develop an autonomous multimedia subsystem to work with functional languages. The autonomous multimedia subsystem is an intermediate level interface that bridges the gap between the two different worlds: high level functional language and low level multimedia operations. This thesis extends a popular functional graphical user interface FUDGET [CH93a] to support multimedia applications. We propose a new fundamental framework of multimedia support via an autonomous multimedia subsystem. Thus provide a practical approach for developing complex multimedia applications by using functional language Haskell [Hea92].