orchid/notes/papers/report/parts/spec/02-parsing.md

Parsing

Orchid expressions are similar in nature to lambda calculus or haskell, except whitespace is mostly irrelevant.

Comments

Orchid borrows Lua's comment syntax. Line comments start with -- and end at a line break. Block comments start with --[ and end with ]--.

Names

name and ns_name tokens appear all over the place in this spec. They represent operators, function names, arguments, modules. A name is

1. the universally recognized operators ,, ., .. and ... (comma and single, double and triple dot)
2. any C identifier
3. any sequence of name-safe characters starting with a character that cannot begin a C identifier. A name-safe character is any non-whitespace Unicode character other than

• digits
• the namespace separator :,
• the parametric expression starters \ and @,
• the string and char delimiters " and ',
• the various brackets(, ), [, ], { and },
• ,, . and $

This means that, in absence of a known list of names, !importatn! is a single name but importatn! is two names, as a name that starts as a C identifier cannot contain special characters. It also means that using non-English characters in Orchid variables is a really bad idea. This is intentional, identifiers that need to be repeated verbatim should only contain characters that appear on all latin keyboards.

There are also reserved words that cannot be used as names; export, import, namespace.

A ns_name is a sequence of one or more name tokens separated by the namespace separator ::.

Clauses

Clauses are the building blocks of Orchid's syntax. They belong to one of a couple categories:

• S-expressions are a parenthesized sequence of space-delimited clauses. All three types of brackets (), [] and {} are supported and treated differently.
• Lambdas start with \, followed by a single clause representing an argument name, then ., then a sequence of clauses representing the body. This is a greedy pattern that ends at the end of an enclosing S-expression, or the end of the line. Lambdas may contain any single clause in the position of an argument during parsing, but by the end of macro execution all arguments must become a ns_name.
• numbers can be in decimal, binary with the 0b prefix, hexadecimal with the 0x prefix, or octal with the 0 prefix. All bases support the decimal point, exponential notation or both. The exponent is prefixed with p, always written in decimal, may be negative, and it represents a power of the base rather than a power of 10. For example, 0xf0.4p-2 is 0xf04 / 16 ^ 3 or ~0.9385.
• Strings are delimited with ", support \ escapes and four digit unicode escapes of the form \uXXXX. They may contain line breaks.
• Chars are a single character or escape from the above description of a string delimited by '.
• Placeholders are either scalar $name, vectorial ..$name, vectorial nonempty ...$name, or either of the vectorial variants with a priority attached ..$name:p, ...$name:p. The name is always a C identifier, p is an integer.
• Names are ns_name

Files

Files are separated into lines. A line is delimited by newlines and only contains newlines within brackets. A line may be an

Import

spec:

import = "import" impot_fragment
import_fragment = "*"
import_fragment = name
import_fragment = "(" import_fragment [ "," import_fragment ]* ")"
import_fragment = name "::" import_fragment 

examples:

import prelude::*
import std::cps
import std::(num::ops::*, fn::*, conv)
import std::proc::(do, let, =, ;)

counterexamples:

import std::()
import std::cpsio::(print, *)
import std::(cpsio)

info

while none of these are guaranteed to work currently, there's little reason they would have to be invalid, so future versions may allow them.

Constant

spec:

constant = name ":=" clause*

the value can consist of multiple clauses during parsing, these will be converted to a single function call after macro execution.

examples:

main := print "Hello World!\n"
pi := 3
e := pi
exponentiate := \n.\exp. do{
  let total = 1;
  loop r on (exp total) with
    if exp == 1 then total
    else r (exp - 1) (total * n)
}

Namespace

spec:

namespace = "namespace" name "{" line* "}"

examples:

foo := 1
bar := baz::quz
namespace baz (
  import super::foo
  export quz := foo + 1
)

Exported member

spec:

exported_member = "export" (constant | rule | namespace)

Explicit export

spec:

export "::" "(" name [ "," name ]* ")"

examples:

export ::(new, map)

Rule

spec:

rule = pattern arrow template
pattern = clause*
template = clause*
arrow = "=" priority "=>' (written together, without spaces)
priority = float

Rule patterns can define new operators implicitly by referencing them, so all tokens must be delimited by spaces. The template is inserted in place of the pattern without parentheses, so unless it's meant to be part of a pattern matched by another rule which expects a particular parenthesization, when more than one token is produced the output should be wrapped in parentheses.

examples:

export loop $r on (...$parameters) with ...$tail =0x5p512=> Y (\$r.
  bind_names (...$parameters) (...$tail)
) ...$parameters

bind_names ($name ..$rest) $payload =0x2p1000=> \$name. bind_names (..$rest) $payload
bind_names () (...$payload) =0x1p1000=> ...$payload

...$left + ...$right:1 =0x1p240=> (add (...$left) (...$right))

Imports

An import is a line starting with the keyword import, followed by a tree of imported names.

import_tree = name
            | name :: import_tree
            | name :: *
            | ( import_tree [, import_tree]+ )

Some examples of valid imports:

import std::cpsio
import std::(conv::parse_float, cpsio, str::*)
import std

Some examples of invalid imports:

import std::()
import std::cpsio::(print, *)
import std::(cpsio)

info

while none of these are guaranteed to work currently, there's little reason they would have to be invalid, so future specifications may allow them.

An import can be normalized into a list of independent imports ending either with a * called wildcard imports or with a name. wildcard imports are normalized to imports for all the names exported from the parent module. All Name clauses in the file starting with a name one of these imports ended with are prefixed with the full import path. The rest of the Name clauses are prefixed with the full path of the current module.

Reference cycles are allowed.