DBL is an experimental programming language designed around the idea of combining lexically scoped effect handlers with a powerful mechanism of implicit and named parameters in a strongly-typed setting. The language is still in the development phase, but core features are already implemented, together with other language features like ML-style parametric polymorphism, rank-N types, mutually recursive data-types, and pattern-matching.
DBL is written in pure OCaml and tested with OCaml system version 5.1.0. DBL uses dune as a build system (tested with version 3.14.0).
Simply type dune build to compile the project. If you use opam package
manager, you can locally install DBL by typing dune install.
Just type dbl (or rlwrap dbl for better readline support) to run the
interpreter in a REPL mode. In this mode you can interactively provide
definitions and expressions to evaluate, separated by double semicolon ;;.
The example REPL session is shown below.
$ dbl
> let id x = x ;;
> id () ;;
: Unit
= ()
>
You can also run programs in a batch mode, by providing a file to execute
as a command-line argument (e.g., dbl filename.dbl).
If you didn't install DBL via dune install (or OPAM, generally) then
it's recommended to set the DBL_LIB environmental variable to the lib
directory of your local installation of DBL.
Several simple examples can be found in the examples directory. Moreover,
in a test/ok directory you can find many tiny examples used to test
implementation of various language features.
Source code can be found in the src directory. For a high-level overview
of the implementation we encourage to look into the src/Pipeline.ml file
and src/Lang directory to see phases and intermediate languages of the
interpreter. To run DBL interpreter on all test programs just type
./test.sh dbl test/test_suite. Bugs can be reported on our
issue tracker.