Harlequin (software company)

Harlequin

The Harlequin lifting tile logo
Trade name	Harlequin
Company type	Private
Industry	Application software Programming languages Think tank
Predecessor	None
Founded	1987; 38 years ago (1987) in Cambridge, East of England, England
Founder	Jo Marks
Defunct	1999 (1999)
Fate	Acquired by Global Graphics
Successors	Functional Objects Global Graphics The Gwydion Maintainers LispWorks Xanalys
Headquarters	Barrington, Cambridgeshire , United Kingdom
Number of locations	8 (1998)
Areas served	Western Europe North America Australia
Key people	Jo Marks
Owner	Jo Marks
Number of employees	300 (1998)

Harlequin was a technology company based in Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, Massachusetts. It specialized in application software for printing, graphics, law enforcement, artificial intelligence, and in implementations of programming languages. Harlequin employees sometimes referred to themselves as "The 'Late Binding' company" and the firm eventually evolved into a think tank for advanced technologies.

After Global Graphics^[1] purchased Harlequin, they spun off the application groups for Lisp, artificial intelligence (AI), and law enforcement as Xanalys,^[2] and they spun off the Harlequin Dylan team as Functional Objects. Global Graphics acquired Harlequin mainly for the PostScript technologies, and it still continues to develop and market them under the Harlequin name.