README.md

red-pure-fun

Purely functional DSL for Red

This is an experiment in building a dialect that will:

• allow computing pure expressions in the middle of Red code

  point is: when one sees a pure invocation, one is 100% sure it didn't shoot his ducks

• do so in a declarative, orderless manner

  point is: tell the parser how X and Y and so and so can be computed and let it decide for itself if it needs to compute them and in what order

• allow using recursive expressions, leveraging tail-call optimization when possible

  point is: get rid of loops to achieve better conciseness and readability of the code

• be very simple, no sophisticated type inference (as a result, no laziness), just the bare minimum

quick start

download, run pure-fun-test.red, the test is the best explanation ;)

some more info is in the file headers too

status

early alpha

proves the concept, fun to play with, still slow but already can map() over 1k items

might have lots of bugs yet

syntax is a subject to change at any time

syntax

best shown by the examples in pure-fun-test.red

but here's some short one:

paren-join: func [x y] [ as paren! append (copy to-block x) y ]

rules: [
	head b: => [ :first b ]
	rest b: => [ :next b ]
	x: ~ y: => [ :paren-join x y ]			;-- (thing ~ thing) concatenates 2 paren expressions into one
	x: + y: => [ :add x y ]
	impure-join b: x: => [:append/only b x]
	map _ [] => [[]]
	map f: b: => [map-tco (:copy []) f b]
	map-tco c: _ [] => [c]
	map-tco c: f: b: => [
		map-tco (impure-join c (f ~ head b)) f (rest b)
	]
]
eval/using [
  map (1 +) [1 2 3]
] rules

should return: [2 3 4]

eval is given an expression that is matched against a set of patterns specified by rules

in the pattern:

words are matched as is (incl. ~ and +)

anything except words is matched as is (1, 2, [], "string", you name it)

set-words (x: y: ...) are catch-all patterns that match anything but words and use it as a named argument

a repeated set-word (f: x: y: x:) only matches it's first bound value

_ is a catch-all pattern that matches anything but words, without binding it

in the expression:

get-words are used to call normal Red functions from the global context

evaluation order

is similar to Red/Rebol: subexpressions come first

suppose I have an expression a b c d, then it is evaluated in the following order:

 a
   b
 a b
     c
   b c
 a b c
       d
     c d
   b c d
 a b c d

if at some point, a pattern matches, say, at b c, the subpattern gets replaced with the result of the subexpression specified by the rule and it becomes a rslt d and continues with a rslt, d, rslt d, a rslt d...

an expression is being evaluated until either:

• it's a singular value like 1 or [block]
• it's end is hit and there are no matches

in the latter case if expr consists of more than 1 token, it is enclosed into parens

• as in the example above with (1 +): there's no pattern that can match 1 + so it's passed as a value

then map function uses ~ to glue the two paren-expressions 1 + and 2 into 1 + 2 that triggers a summing pattern