Last update: 2 July 2008
The Nonpareil Project is a software project being undertaken by Jeffrey H. Kingston of the School of Information Technologies at The University of Sydney, Australia. The aim is to build an open source interactive document editing system which advances the state of the art. More details, including the answers to most frequently asked questions, may be found in the Prospectus for Nonpareil (see below).
Although I have been thinking about this problem along these lines since 1996, and have supervised some student projects in the area in the last few years, the project only really took off in 2002 with the thesis of my honours student, Bradley Baetz (see below), and my resignation from paid employment in August 2002 to pursue research full-time. Progress since then has been slower than I had hoped, principally because my other research project, high school timetable construction, started to go very well just then and has since consumed a lot of my time. It is however close to mature now and will be less of a distraction from now on.
Nonpareil is based on a functional object-oriented language, also called Nonpareil, which has a modern module and type system. My current sub-project is KMT, a C library for supporting those aspects of the language in a language-independent way, so that other researchers can use KMT for their own languages. The next release of the Nonpareil compiler will use KMT.
I cordially welcome comments, suggestions, and pointers to relevant other work. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have something of interest to communicate. Better still, if your interest is likely to be ongoing, join the mailing list (see below).
Jeffrey H. Kingston
jeff@it.usyd.edu.au
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Nonpareil Language Specification (PostScript, 3.0M) (Gzipped PostScript, 346K). Also see more recent version below.
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Nonpareil Compiler, Version 1.02. This is just an alpha release, it does not do any document formatting! (Gzipped tar file, 1.5M).
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Nonpareil Language Specification, Version 1.2 (November 2006) (PostScript, 2.4M) (Gzipped PostScript, 281K). Apologies for the illogical version number.
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Nonpareil Document Formatting (November 2006) (PostScript, 458K) (Gzipped PostScript, 106K).
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Nonpareil Implementation Notes (PostScript, 647K) (Gzipped PostScript, 194K).
My diary recording the progress of the project (including KMT) to July 2008.
Jeffrey H. Kingston. The future of document formatting (PostScript, 176K). Written in November 1996.
Bradley Baetz. Nonpareil - a strongly typed object oriented functional programming language (Honours thesis, November 2002) (PostScript, 350K)
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Prospectus for Nonpareil. December 2002. (PostScript, 1028K) (Gzipped PostScript, 132K)
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Nonpareil Language Specification, Version 1.0. February 2003. This is not the complete specification, rather it's what I've implementated so far (lexing, parsing, views and renaming -- everything up to but not including type checking) (PostScript, 1.5M) (Gzipped PostScript, 105K)
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Nonpareil Language Specification, Version 1.1. August 2003. Progress to August 2003, including a working type system but not yet a back end. (PostScript, 2.2M) (Gzipped PostScript, 281K)
Jeffrey H. Kingston. Thoughts on Modelling Text in Nonpareil. October 2004. (PostScript, 45K)