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58 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
58 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
# Lama
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 is a programming language developed by JetBrains Research for educational purposes as an exemplary language to introduce
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the domain of programming languages, compilers and tools. Its general characteristics are:
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* procedural with first-class functions - functions can be passed as arguments, placed in data structures,
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returned and "constructed" at runtime via closure mechanism;
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* with lexical static scoping;
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* strict - all arguments of function application are evaluated before function body;
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* imperative - variables can be re-assigned, function calls can have side effects;
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* untyped - no static type checking is performed;
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* with S-expressions and pattern-matching;
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* with user-defined infix operators, including those defined in local scopes;
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* with automatic memory management (garbage collection).
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The name  is an acronym for *Lambda-Algol* since the language has borrowed the syntactic shape of
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operators from **Algol-68**; [**Haskell**](www.haskell.org) and [**OCaml**](www.ocaml.org) can be
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mentioned as other languages of inspiration.
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The main purpose of  is to present a repertoire of constructs with certain runtime behavior and
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relevant implementation techniques. The lack of a type system (a vital feature for a real-word language
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for software engineering) is an intensional decision which allows to show the unchained diversity
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of runtime behaviors, including those which a typical type system is called to prevent. On the other hand
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the language can be used in future as a raw substrate to apply various ways of software verification (including
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type systems) on.
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The current implementation contains a native code compiler for **x86-32**, written
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in **OCaml**, a runtime library with garbage-collection support, written in **C**, and a small
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standard library, written in  itself. The native code compiler uses **gcc** as a toolchain.
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In addition, a source-level reference interpreter is implemented as well as a compiler to a small
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stack machine. The stack machine code can in turn be either interpreted on a stack machine interpreter, or
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used as an intermediate representation by the native code compiler.
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## Language Specification
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The language specification can be found [here](lama-spec.pdf).
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## Installation
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Prerequisites:
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* gcc-multilib
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* ocaml (>= 4.07.1) [http://ocaml.org]
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* opam (>= 2.0.4) [http://opam.ocaml.org]
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Installing:
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* `opam pin add -n ostap https://github.com/dboulytchev/ostap.git#memoCPS` (remember of "#" being a comment character in bash)
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* `opam pin add -y lama https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/Lama.git`
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Smoke-testing:
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* `pushd tutorial`
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* `make`
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* `popd`
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