Note here that the language used (Miranda) was perhaps the most influential language in the design and implementation of Haskell. The motivation for Haskell was mainly to explore the non-strict semantics of Miranda in an open environment with an open specification.
There was a lot of programming language research in the 1970's and 1980's that is not really used in mainstream programming languages in these days.
A good collection of this material can be found in Simon Peyton-Jones' book "The implementation of functional programming languages". Probably out of print (my uni library has one), but freely available on the net, here's the link:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
It's worth to note that since the Miranda days, Haskell has added type classes that can do some OO-style stuff and more, a sensible and efficient solution for IO that also works well in parallel and a kick-ass compiler and run time system.
