FLAN: a functional language
FLAN is a toy functional language realised as a series of evaluators written in C. It supports higher-order functions, simple types, user-defined algebraic datatypes, and strict and lazy evaluation. There is also a simpler first-order strict evaluator. There is no type inference or parametric polymorphism.
It was intended to be a vehicle for assignments for first year students at CSE, UNSW circa 2008. John Shepherd commissioned this project and Peter Gammie executed it. It owes some inspiration to C/Java compiler first-year assignments dating back to 1996. Andrew Taylor was responsible for some of these.
FLAN comes with FLANGE - the FLAN graphics engine, which is based on the functional geometry ideas originated by Peter Henderson. The system renders potentially infinite (co-recursive) pictures as SVG files.
Additionally there are many small tests that contain some classical functional programming techniques. These were scraped from the GHC test suite, Prolog folklore, textbooks (Bird/Wadler, Thompson, ...) and functional pearls. Provenance and authorship should be clear for non-trivial examples; if it is not, please tell me.
Building
Dependencies:
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A modern C compiler supporting at least C99. FLAN was developed using gcc-4.2 under Mac OS X 10.6 (and earlier), and some archaisms remain. It has been tested using gcc-4.8.3 and clang-3.3 under Debian.
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perl, to generate the header file for the lexer.
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flex, to generate the lexer itself.
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H.-J. Boehm's garbage collector (optional)
Building it should simply be a matter of typing "make". Investigate the Makefile if it is not.
The code was intended to be warning-free (modulo the output of flex), and is with GCC but not clang.
Execution
The command-line arguments for the flan executable should be self-explanatory:
$ flan --help
Examples
Suffix "-fail" means the test should be flagged as an error.
- 0 - basic syntax
- 1 - simple functions over Int, tuples
- 2 - simple functions over lists
- 3 - types, type errors
- 4 - higher-order functions (that work with strict eval)
- 5 - scoping (turn the type checker off)
- 6 - serious list algorithms
- 7 - graphs
- 8 - long programs (that work with strict eval)
- 9 - laziness, user-defined types, ...
Ideas for further development
FLAN
- Accurate garbage collection
- REPL
- Types: parametric polymorphism
- More built-in functions
- Nested comments
- Allow primes in identifiers
- Add input and output (caveat: laziness)
FLANGE
- Compile FLANGE images to SVG and JavaScript, allowing zooming of (co-)recursive images and animations (= lazy list of FLANGE images).
- Colours.
- Text.
Examples
- Dijkstra et al shortest paths
- Kruskal / Prim spanning-trees
- Continuations, such as backtracking ala Hutton et al
- Logic programming
- enumerate the digits of e
- Minimax ala Bird/Hughes
- "Seemingly impossible" functional programs ala Escardo
- DLPP (etc) SAT algorithm
- Rosetta Code programming tasks
- Bernie: interpreter for an imperative language
- Functional arrays / priority queues ala Okasaki/Paulson
Bugs and infelicities
Possibly quite stale.
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Parser: verify we've hit EOF when parsing is finished.
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Scope within a 'let' block is a bit strange:
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constants can use earlier definitions in the same block.
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functions can use any definition in the same block.
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Fix the scoping up in the higher-order strict evaluator.
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decide on let or letrec and make it stick.
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Ensure that the same variable is not given several definitions in the same scope.
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Reduce duplication between e_expr and e_binary_op
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Write a test that establishes that updating closures is not correct (eval-hol:236).
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I think one can do this by using a HOF twice.
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Check very carefully about updating values of all kinds.
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Type checker should take evaluator scope into account.
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e.g. constants are not in-scope in their own definitions in strict evaluators.
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./flan -lflange/920-turtle