In case something in the type unification tries to speculatively call
Info before it's ready to produce a valid sig, make sure we only return
a definitive answer (non-nil, and no variant types) once we've
conclusively finished defining the signature.
In case a programmer makes a mistake and passes in a function using the
simple function API without a type or even without the entire value,
we'll now return a sensible error message and panic in init() instead of
requiring a test to catch this alone.
I seem to have forgotten to differentiate between the empty string and
no data because the zero value for the stored result was the empty
string. This turns it into a pointer so that we don't block the function
engine if a template or one of the other patched functions sends an
empty string as the first value.
This adds a giant missing piece of the language: proper function values!
It is lovely to now understand why early programming language designers
didn't implement these, but a joy to now reap the benefits of them. In
adding these, many other changes had to be made to get them to "fit"
correctly. This improved the code and fixed a number of bugs.
Unfortunately this touched many areas of the code, and since I was
learning how to do all of this for the first time, I've squashed most of
my work into a single commit. Some more information:
* This adds over 70 new tests to verify the new functionality.
* Functions, global variables, and classes can all be implemented
natively in mcl and built into core packages.
* A new compiler step called "Ordering" was added. It is called by the
SetScope step, and determines statement ordering and shadowing
precedence formally. It helped remove at least one bug and provided the
additional analysis required to properly capture variables when
implementing function generators and closures.
* The type unification code was improved to handle the new cases.
* Light copying of Node's allowed our function graphs to be more optimal
and share common vertices and edges. For example, if two different
closures capture a variable $x, they'll both use the same copy when
running the function, since the compiler can prove if they're identical.
* Some areas still need improvements, but this is ready for mainstream
testing and use!
This is a giant refactor to move functions into a hierarchial module
layout. While this isn't entirely implemented yet, it should work
correctly once all the import bits have landed. What's broken at the
moment is the template function, which currently doesn't understand the
period separator.
I forgot to handle the special case of a function using this API that
received no inputs. It was waiting for the first input to come in, and
as a result was never producing any output.
Remember that functions like this should *almost* be thought of as
constants of the system. You would expect their output to never change
during the lifetime of a particular program invocation.
This patch adds a simple function API for writing simple, pure
functions. This should reduce the amount of boilerplate required for
most functions, and make growing a stdlib significantly easier. If you
need to build more complex, event-generating functions, or statically
polymorphic functions, then you'll still need to use the normal API for
now.
This also makes all of these pure functions available automatically
within templates. It might make sense to group these functions into
packages to make their logical organization easier, but this is a good
enough start for now.
Lastly, this added some missing pieces to our types library. You can now
use `ValueOf` to convert from a `reflect.Value` to the corresponding
`Value` in our type system, if an equivalent exists.
Unfortunately, we're severely lacking in tests for these new types
library additions, but look forward to growing some in the future!
