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'Can a Programming Language Implement Time Travel?'

Stack Overflow's blog reports on a new programming language called Mariposa. They call it a "toy" programming language, "created as a way to play around with a novel or odd feature, like variable assignment outside of the normal order of execution — more colloquially, time travel." Compute...

Computer science has long sought to reason about time in electronic systems, thanks to a consistent interest in concurrency and real-time messaging... Mariposa allows you to manipulate the order of execution by assigning an instant to a variable, then setting the context of that instance. While Mariposa caught a fair amount of attention recently, it's not the first implementation of time travel in programming. There is a Haskell package appropriately called tardis, which creates two state transformers: one travels forward in time and one backward.

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