| Orwell | |
| Paradigm: | Lazy, functional |
| Designer: | Philip Wadler |
| Developer: | Martin Raskovsky |
| Latest Release Version: | 6.00 |
| Operating System: | Unix |
| Influenced By: | Miranda |
| Influenced: | Haskell |
Orwell is a small, lazy evaluation, functional programming language implemented principally by Martin Raskovsky and first released in 1984 by Philip Wadler during his time as a Research Fellow in the Programming Research Group, part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. Developed as a free alternative to Miranda, it was a forerunner of Haskell and was one of the first programming languages to support list comprehensions and pattern matching.
The name is a tribute to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the year in which the language was released. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, most of the computing practical assignments for undergraduates studying for a degree in Mathematics and Computation at Oxford University were required to be completed using the language.