University develops polyglot programming language

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States have designed a computer language that allows developers to use different, existing programming languages when coding.

Wessex Wyvern.

The project aims to allow several specific progamming languages - such as structured query language for database work, and hypertext markup language for web pages - to be used as sub-languages within one language.

Project lead, Carnegie Mellon university computer scientist Jonathan Aldrich, described the "Wyvern" programming language as an international negotiator that speaks many tongues and can smoothly switch between them to make a whole team of people work better together.

Being able to use different programming languages for different tasks when developing a program leads to higher productivity, the researchers believe.

Beyond making it possible to use domain-specific languages, Wyvern also eliminates SQL injection and cross-site scriptiing attacks.

The open source Wyvern isn't fully engineered but an experimental version for early adopters is ready on Github and can be compiled with the Java 8 software development kit.

Work on Wyvern started with a joint Carnegie Mellon and Victoria University, Wellington research paper, titled Safely Composable Type-Specific Languages [PDF].

It recently won the distinguised paper award at the European Conference on Object Oriented Programming in Uppsala, Sweden.

The programming language was partly funded by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and the country's controversial spy bureau, the National Security Agency, along with the Royal Society of New Zealand's Marsden Fund.