What is "whiley"

Whiley is the surname of:

• Manning Whiley (1915–1975), British actor
• Richard Whiley (born 1935), English cricketer
• Jo Whiley (born 1965), English DJ
• Matthew Whiley (born 1980), English cricketer
• Jordanne Whiley (born 1992), British wheelchair tennis player
• Mark Whiley (born 1992), Australian rules footballer

In computer programming, Whiley is the name of a functional and imperative programming language supporting design by contract and flow-sensitive typing.

Whiley is a general purpose multi-paradigm, compiled language developed by David Pearce. The language combines features from the Functional and Imperative paradigms, is statically typed and supports formal specification through function preconditions, postconditions and loop invariants. The language is also notable for the use of flow-sensitive typing, also known as "flow typing".

The Whiley project began in 2009 in response to the "Verifying Compiler Grand Challenge" put forward by Tony Hoare in 2003. The first public release of Whiley was made in June, 2010.

Although Whiley is primarily developed by David Pearce, it is an open source project that has attracted contributions from a small community. The system has been used for a number of student research projects and also in teaching undergraduate classes. The project was also supported between 2012 and 2014 by the Royal Society of New Zealand's Marsden Fund.

The Whiley compiler currently generates code for the Java virtual machine and can thus inter-operate with Java and other JVM based languages.