Tuesday 17 April 2018

egg Functions

My first test script for functions in egg was everyone's favourite chestnut: the Fibonacci series.

  int fibonacci(int n) {
    if (n < 2) {
      return n;
    }
    return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2);
  }
  print(fibonacci(10));

It does indeed print out "55"!

In egg, functions defined like this are actually special cases of callable objects. The script declares an identifier "fibonacci" which is initialised with an instance of an object that supports the "call" operation: in this case, taking a single integer parameter and returning an integer.

At present, there is no notion of read-only variables in egg, so it's possible to subsequently assign a different function to "fibonacci":

  int fibonacci(int n) {
    if (n < 2) {
      return n;
    }
    return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2);
  }
  int zero(int n) {
    return 0;
  }
  fibonacci = zero;
  print(fibonacci(10));

This prints out "0". It's a good demonstration that functions in egg are considered first-class entities, but it might violate the principle of "least surprise" for newcomers.

egg "For" Statements

Recently, I got my first egg script running. Here it is:

  var s = 0;
  for (var i = 0; i < 100; ++i) {
    s += i;
  }
  print(s);

You'll be unsurprised to hear that this printed out "4950" (it was a pleasant surprise to me when it first happened, though, I can tell you!)

There are three things worth mentioning in this script.

Firstly, the "var" keyword initiates type inference for variables "s" and "i". In both cases, "int" is inferred (there are no unsigned integers in egg).

Secondly, the "print" function is a built-in method that will probably be removed, but is useful for testing, at the moment.

Finally, the syntax of "for" statements turns out to be non-trivial. Like C++, I adopted two forms:

  for (before ; condition ; step) { ... }
  for (iterator : collection) { ... }

The latter form is for iterating around collections, which we won't discuss here.

My main concern with the former form of the "for" loop is:
Which syntactic elements are valid for "before", "condition" and "step"?
The easiest of the three clauses is "condition". It's optional, but I only allow expressions that evaluate to Boolean values. This is similar to all the main curly-brace languages (C/C++/Java/JavaScript).

The "before" statement is also optional, but it must be a statement. This includes variable declarations: the scope of such variables is limited to the "for" statement, including the "condition" and "step" clauses. Again this is similar to the other languages (if we ignore JavaScript's problematic scoping rules).

The "step" statement is optional too, but cannot be a declaration. As mentioned previously, the increment and decrement operators are supported in egg purely to allow the classic for-loop idiom seen in this example.

But then I got a bit confused with which egg statements should be valid for "before" and "step". Can you use "break" and "continue"? If so, what do they do?

So I asked my C++ compiler, and it says that I cannot use "break" or "continue", but I can "throw" exceptions. The reason you cannot "break" or "continue" in "before" and "step" clauses is because those statements are just that: statements. The "before" and "step" clauses in C++ expect C++ expressions.

But why can you "throw" exceptions in those clauses in C++?

  for (auto i = 0; i < 100; throw "Bang!") {} // Valid C++

Well, it turns out that what I think of as throw statements are actually throw expressions (of type "void") in the formal syntax. It's a cul-de-sac that others have found themselves in too!

As egg is meant to be an easy-to-learn language, with few surprises, I decided to classify "throw" as a statement and explicitly forbid it in expressions and "before" and "step" clauses of "for" statements.

Tuesday 3 April 2018

ZX Spectrum Flags of the European Union

Someone, somewhere, out there on the Internet, is looking for the flags of the twenty-eight (current) member countries of the European Union  ... in the original Sinclair ZX Spectrum SCREEN$ format. Surely...

Sunday 1 April 2018

Mappa Edmundi de Waal

Personally, I think Edmund missed a trick...


(original by Edmund de Waal)