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lama_byterun/README.md
Dmitry Boulytchev 4aee344a4e Better md
2020-02-18 13:49:38 +03:00

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Lama

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\lama is a programming language developed by JetBrains Research for educational purposes as an exemplary language to introduce the domain of programming languages, compilers and tools. Its general characteristics are:

  • procedural with first-class functions - functions can be passed as arguments, placed in data structures, returned and "constructed" at runtime via closure mechanism;
  • with lexical static scoping;
  • strict - all arguments of function application are evaluated before function body;
  • imperative - variables can be re-assigned, function calls can have side effects;
  • untyped - no static type checking is performed;
  • with S-expressions and pattern-matching;
  • with user-defined infix operators, including those defined in local scopes;
  • with automatic memory management (garbage collection).

The name \lama is an acronym for $\lambda$-Algol since the language has borrowed the syntactic shape of operators from Algol-68; Haskell and OCaml can be mentioned as other languages of inspiration.

The main purpose of \lama is to present a repertoire of constructs with certain runtime behavior and relevant implementation techniques. The lack of a type system (a vital feature for a real-word language for software engineering) is an intensional decision which allows to show the unchained diversity of runtime behaviors, including those which a typical type system is called to prevent. On the other hand the language can be used in future as a raw substrate to apply various ways of software verification (including type systems) on.

The current implementation contains a native code compiler for x86-32, written in OCaml, a runtime library with garbage-collection support, written in C, and a small standard library, written in \lama itself. The native code compiler uses gcc as a toolchain.

In addition, a source-level reference interpreter is implemented as well as a compiler to a small stack machine. The stack machine code can in turn be either interpreted on a stack machine interpreter, or used as an intermediate representation by the native code compiler.

Installation

Prerequisites:

Installing:

  • opam pin add -n ostap https://github.com/dboulytchev/ostap.git#memoCPS
  • opam pin add -y lama https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/Lama.git