This adds the requirement that all function implementations provider a
String() string method so that these can be used as vertices in the
pgraph library. If we eventually move to generics for the pgraph DAG,
then this might not matter, but it's not bad that these have names
either.
This adds support for variant types in the simple poly definitions. It
is recommended that you avoid using these as much as possible, because
they're a bit harder for the type unification to solve for them. The way
this works is that these functions look at the available input types and
then generate a (recursive) set of invariants which might hold true. It
filters out any impossible ones, which is where this variant matching is
done. It's less likely that you'll get a solution with this mechanism,
but it is possible.
This is an implementation of the Unify approach for the simplepoly
function API, which wraps the full function API. It is unique in that a
lot of different functions use it, and it is easy to build functions
with it. It needs to use exclusives to represent the different options,
but at least it filters out any that aren't viable.
The Unify implementation here is fairly similar to the patterns in the
template() function.
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.
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.
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.
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.
