Joost van Dijk en Erik Meijer
Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht
<joostd@cs.ruu.nl>
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for communication between external applications and World Wide Web servers. CGI programs are programs that are executed on these servers and that use the CGI to communicate information from and to World Wide Web clients.
Functional programming languages like Gofer enable the design of programs on a high level of abstraction. A functional program can be seen as an executable specification, and it is easy to reason about such programs. Furthermore, functional languages are often strongly typed, which means that many programming error are discovered at compile time.
CGI programs are typically written in languages as C or PERL. In this paper we show that functional languages (in casu: Gofer) are particularly well suited as an alternative implementation language for CGI programs.