This is a newer implementation of the panic magic. I kept the old commit
in for posterity and to show the difference. The two versions are
identical to the end-user with one exception: the newer version doesn't
include a useless panic resource in the graph when there is no panic. In
this version, the panic function returns false and the if statement it's
the condition of, doesn't produce the resource within. On error, we
still consume the function in the if expression, and doing so causes
everything to shutdown.
The other benefit is that the implementation is much cleaner and doesn't
need the interpolate hack.
It's valuable to check your runtime values and to shut down the entire
engine in case something doesn't match. This patch adds some magic
plumbing to support a "panic" mechanism.
A new "panic" statement gets transparently converted into a panic
function and panic resource. The former errors if the input is not
empty. The latter must be present to consume the value, but doesn't
actually do anything.
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.
