Microsoft is preparing to release a new functional programming language dubbed F# – pronounced F-sharp.

The company has yet to issue a detailed release schedule, but support for the language will be added to Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net developer tools and will offer integration into the .Net framework, S. 'Soma' Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, wrote on a company blog.

Develop by Microsoft Research, F# is intended to appeal to developers of mathematical applications in areas such as financial, scientific and technical computing. It should also increase the appeal of .Net to academia, Somasegar wrote.

Functional programming languages such as APL, Erlangor or Lisp treat computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. They avoid state and mutable data, which are at the core of imperative programming languages such as Fortran or Java, which form the class of object-oriented programming languages within the imperative group.