F# (pronounced F sharp) is a functional and object oriented programming language for the Microsoft .NET platform. F# is a variant of the ML programming language. F# can be used to access hundreds of .NET libraries, and the F# code can be accessed from C# and other .NET languages. Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the imperative programming style that emphasizes changes in state.

See the latest release and download information for the Microsoft Research implementation of F# at here. The following steps guide you to download, install, and compiling your first program, with F# version 1.1.12.6 with .NET 2.0, and then let’s try the “Hello World” program below:

• From Add/Remove programs, uninstall any previous F# installs.
• Download F# and save the zip file locally.
• Extract the files to a temporary location.
• Run the .msi installer from that directory. This requires .NET 2.0.
Note, if you have Visual Studio, the installer will run devenv /setup which takes some moments.
• Add the F# bin directory to your path:
set PATH=c:\Program Files\FSharp-1.1.12.6\bin\;%PATH%
• fsc is the command line compiler. You can list the command line options as follows:
fsc -help
• Create a source directory.
• Create a .fs file, containing:
printf "Hello World!\n"
• Compile it to give a hello.exe which you can run.
fsc hello.fs hello.exe

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