It was produced by Research Software Ltd. of England (which holds a trademark on the name Miranda)[3] and was the first purely functional language to be commercially supported.

[5][6] The name Miranda is taken from the gerundive form of the latin verb miror,[7] meaning "to be admired".

The logo features a rendition by John William Waterhouse of the character Miranda from Shakespeare's The Tempest.

A Miranda program (called a script) is a set of equations that define various mathematical functions and algebraic data types.

The word set is important here: the order of the equations is, in general, irrelevant, and there is no need to define an entity prior to its use.

A character string is simply a list of char, while num is silently converted between two underlying forms: arbitrary-precision integers (a.k.a.

Tuples are sequences of elements of potentially mixed types, analogous to records in Pascal-like languages, and are written delimited with parentheses: The list instead is the most commonly used data structure in Miranda.