In the past weeks I’ve worked a lot on the minicaml programming language. In this post I’m recapping all the various features I have added with their corresponding syntax. Now that the language is almost feature complete, the next releases will focus on the standard library, stability, testing, and improvements of the internals. If you are interested in programming language development, note that I am looking for contributors to help in testing and making the language more stable.

Installation

To install, you need to have opam (OCaml’s package manager) and a recent OCaml distribution installed on your system. You can install minicaml by running

opam install minicaml

rlwrap is suggested for a readline-like (bash-like) keyboard interface.

Manual installation

# clone the repository git clone https://github.com/0x0f0f0f/minicaml # cd into it cd minicaml # install dependencies opam install dune menhir ANSITerminal cmdliner alcotest bisect_ppx # compile make # test make test # run make run # rlwrap is suggested rlwrap make run # you can install minicaml with make install # run again rlwrap minicaml

Usage

The executable name is minicaml . If a file is specified as the first command line argument, then it will be ran as a program. If you are running a program you may want to use the flag -p to print the results of the expressions that are evaluated. Otherwise, if a program is not specified a REPL session will be opened. If the minicaml executable is ran with the flag -v1 , it will show the AST equivalent of each submitted expression, if ran with -v2 it will also show each reduction step in the evaluation. Use the experimental -j flag to compile a program to Javascript, using the Ramda library as a “functional prelude”, please note that a lot of stuff is still broken.

Keep in mind that minicaml is purely functional and values are immutable.

Examples

Check the examples/ directory for some example programs.

Features

Arithmetics with full scheme-like numeric tower

Integer division returns integers. Floating point numbers decimal part can be omitted if it is 0. Floating point numbers can use the power syntax using e .

1 + 2 + 3 * (4 - 1) ;; 1 + 4.0 - 1. / 2.315 ;; 1.2e-3 ;; true && false || (1 < 2) && (1 = 1) ;;

Complex numbers

The :+ and :- operators are used to create complex values, the floating point number on the left is the real part and the one on the right is the imaginary part.

12. :+ 1.12;; 0. :- 1.12;;

Strings and Lists

Here is how to concatenate strings

"hello " ^ "world"

:: means is the classic cons operator, while @ is used for list concatenation as in OCaml

1 :: [2] @ [3]

To convert any value to a string you can use the show primitive.

Declarations

Local declaration statements are purely functional and straightforward:

let x = 4 and y = 1 in x + y

Global declaration statements create new, purely functional environments in both programs and the REPL. Omitting in is syntax-sugar, subsequent blocks will be evaluated in the resulting new environment.

let a = 2 ;; x + 3 ;;

Functions and recursion

For parsing simplicity, only the OCaml anonymous function style of declaring functions is supported. The keyword fun is interchangeable with lambda .

(fun x -> x + 1) 1;; let rec fib = fun n -> if n < 2 then n else (fib (n - 1)) + fib (n - 2)

Printing

The impure primitives print and print_endline automatically call show on a value. The difference between them is that print_endline automatically adds a newline at the end of the line.

Haskell-like dollar syntax

Too many parens?

f (g (h (i 1 2 3)))

Is equivalent to

f $ g $ h $ i 1 2 3

Toggle between pure and impure environments in code for I/O

You can choose to enable or disable impure primitives explicitely, inside an expression by wrapping it into the pure and impure statements. They must be followed by an expression. An expression contained in an impure statement is a computation that calls primitives that have side effects, such as direct memory access or I/O access.

It is good practice to reduce the use of the pure/impure keywords as much as possible, and to avoid using it inside of function bodies. This means keeping your code as purely functional as you can.

let bad_function = fun x -> impure ( let mystring = "I am a bad impure function! Also: " ^ x in print_endline mystring );; let good_function = fun x -> print_endline ("I am a good function! Also: " ^ x) ;; bad_function "hello!" ;; (* The above statement is causing side effects but will not error*) good_function "hello!" ;; (* The above will error, because it is trying to execute an impure computation in a pure environment Here's a good way of calling it *) impure $ good_function "hello!" ;; (* You can specify that you DO NOT want to compute impure expressions by using the pure statement *) pure $ good_function "henlo world!" ;; (* The above will error because it contains an impure computation*) pure $ bad_function "ciao mondo!" ;; (* The above will error because a pure context does not allow nesting an impure context inside *)

A good way of structuring your code is keeping pure/impure statements as external from expressions as you can (towards the top level). By default, the interpreter is in a uncertain state, it means that it will allow the execution of impure statements

Function pipes (reverse composition)

You can redirect the result of a function to the first argument of another function using the >=> operator.

let sum_and_add_one = (fun x y -> x + y) >=> (fun z -> z + 1) ;; sum_and_add_one 2 3 (* Will output 6, because 2 + 3 is piped into z + 1*)

Yields the same result as normal composition:

let my_sum = (fun x y -> x + y) ;; let add_one = (fun z -> z + 1) ;; add_one (mysum 2 3)

Dictionaries