This is an implementation of the Unify approach for the operator
function. It is unique in that it is a wrapper around the simple
operator function API.
To improve the filtering, it would be excellent if we could examine the
return type in `solved` somehow (if it is known) and use that to trim
our list of exclusives down even further! The smaller exclusives are,
the faster everything in the solver can run.
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 adds a simple API for adding static, polymorphic, pure functions.
This lets you define a list of type signatures and the associated
implementations to overload a particular function name. The internals of
this API then do all of the hard work of matching the available
signatures to what statically type checks, and then calling the
appropriate implementation.
While this seems as if this would only work for function polymorphism
with a finite number of possible types, while this is mostly true, it
also allows you to add the `variant` "wildcard" type into your
signatures which will allow you to match a wider set of signatures.
A canonical use case for this is the len function which can determine
the length of both lists and maps with any contained type. (Either the
type of the list elements, or the types of the map keys and values.)
When using this functionality, you must be careful to ensure that there
is only a single mapping from possible type to signature so that the
"dynamic dispatch" of the function is unique.
It is worth noting that this API won't cover functions which support an
arbitrary number of input arguments. The well-known case of this,
printf, is implemented with the more general function API which is more
complicated.
This patch also adds some necessary library improvements for comparing
types to partial types, and to types containing variants.
Lastly, this fixes a bug in the `NewType` parser which parsed certain
complex function types wrong.
This is an initial implementation of the mgmt language. It is a
declarative (immutable) functional, reactive, domain specific
programming language. It is intended to be a language that is:
* safe
* powerful
* easy to reason about
With these properties, we hope this language, and the mgmt engine will
allow you to model the real-time systems that you'd like to automate.
This also includes a number of other associated changes. Sorry for the
large size of this patch.
