Composable and hygienic typed syntax macros

Omar, Cyrus; Wang, Chenglong; Aldrich, Jonathan

doi:10.1145/2695664.2695936

Cited by 2 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(17 reference statements)

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“…We also showed several case studies to demonstrate our system can implement various language constructs with custom name binding. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This limitation breaks the composability of libraries, as several libraries cannot be used together. Several languages such as Nemerle [23] also support user-defined [15][16][17][18][19][20] syntax extensions based on macros but their capabilities are more limited. In the case of Nemerle, the users can only define the syntax where the first token is an identifier.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Type-specific languages (TSLs) [17] and typed syntax macros (TSMs) [18] are a language feature that supports composable user-defined syntax extensions. Here, composable means that users can use several syntax extensions in the same source file.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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User-Defined Operators Including Name Binding for New Language Constructs

Ichikawa

Chiba

2017

Programming

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User-defined syntax extensions are useful to implement an embedded domain specific language (EDSL) with good code readability. They allow EDSL authors to define domain-natural notation, which is often different from the host language syntax. Recently, there have been several research works of powerful user-defined syntax extensions.One promising approach uses user-defined operators. A user-defined operator is a function with userdefined syntax. It can be regarded as a syntax extension implemented without macros. An advantage of userdefined operators is that an operator can be statically typed. The compiler can find type errors in the definition of an operator before the operator is used. In addition, the compiler can resolve syntactic ambiguities by using static types. However, language constructs involving static name binding are difficult to implement with userdefined operators. Name binding is an association between names and values (or memory locations). Our inquiry is whether we can design a system for user-defined operators involving a new custom name binding.This paper proposes a variant of a lambda expression, called a context-sensitive expression. A contextsensitive expression looks like a normal expression but it implicitly takes parameters. To realize user-defined name binding, these parameters are accessed through public members such as methods and operators of a parameter object instead of through parameter names. Programmers can emulate name binding by such methods or operators, for example, they can emulate a local variable through a getter operator and a setter operator. We also present turnstile type to give a type to a context-sensitive expression, DSL class to cooperate with syntax extension, and generic name to recognize arbitrary names given by users.A contribution of this paper is that we reveal that we can integrate a system for managing names and their scopes with the module system and type system of an object-oriented language such as Java. Programmers can define new language constructs involving custom name binding and other programmers can use them by importing modules. The compiler can statically verify the types of both the definition and usage of the language constructs.We have implemented ProteaJ2, a programming language based on Java, and it supports our proposal. We describe a parsing method that adopts eager disambiguation for fast parsing and discuss its time complexity. To show the practicality of our proposal, we have conducted two micro benchmarks to see the performance of our compiler. We also show several use cases of DSL classes for demonstrating DSL classes can express various language constructs.Our ultimate goal is to let programmers add any kind of new language construct to a host language. To do this, programmers should be able to define new syntax, name binding, and type systems within the host language. This paper shows that programmers can define name binding with their own syntax. ACM CCS 2012Software and its engineering → Extensible languages;

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“…We also showed several case studies to demonstrate our system can implement various language constructs with custom name binding. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

User-Defined Operators Including Name Binding for New Language Constructs

Ichikawa

Chiba

2017

Programming

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“…Accordingly, different TLMs can operate at the same type, and they can operate at any type, including structural types. In a subsequent short paper, Omar et al [2015] suggested explicit application of simple expression TLMs also in a bidirectional typed setting [Pierce and Turner 2000], but that paper did not have any formal content. With TLMs, it is not necessary for the language to be bidirectionally typed (see Sec.…”

Section: Syntax Definition Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasonably programmable literal notation

Omar

Aldrich

2018

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

Self Cite

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General-purpose programming languages typically define literal notation for only a small number of common data structures, like lists. This is unsatisfying because there are many other data structures for which literal notation might be useful, e.g. finite maps, regular expressions, HTML elements, SQL queries, syntax trees for various languages and chemical structures. There may also be different implementations of each of these data structures behind a common interface that could all benefit from common literal notation. This paper introduces typed literal macros (TLMs), which allow library providers to define new literal notation of nearly arbitrary design at any specified type or parameterized family of types. Compared to existing approaches, TLMs are uniquely reasonable. TLM clients can reason abstractly, i.e. without examining grammars or generated expansions, about types and binding. The system only needs to convey to clients, via secondary notation, the inferred segmentation of each literal body, which gives the locations and types of spliced subterms. TLM providers can reason modularly about syntactic ambiguity and expansion correctness according to clear criteria. This paper incorporates TLMs into Reason, an emerging alternative front-end for OCaml, and demonstrates, through several non-trivial case studies, how TLMs integrate with the advanced features of OCaml, including pattern matching and the module system. We also discuss optional integration with MetaOCaml, which allows TLM providers to be more confident about type correctness. Finally, we establish these abstract reasoning principles formally with a detailed type-theoretic account of expression and pattern TLMs for łcore MLž.

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Composable and hygienic typed syntax macros

Cited by 2 publications

References 16 publications

User-Defined Operators Including Name Binding for New Language Constructs

User-Defined Operators Including Name Binding for New Language Constructs

Reasonably programmable literal notation

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