Today I implemented a simple mechanism for importing modules in Hel. Basically, you can write:
import foo/bar/baz
and it will look for a file named foo/bar/baz.hel, load it as a module containing the bindings defined in the file, and expose the module as baz to the calling code. So if foo/bar/baz.hel defines a function hello, then after you import foo/bar/baz, you can call the function as baz.hello(). Alternatively, you can import the module with a different name using:
import foo/bar/baz as whatever
and access the bindings like whatever.hello().
That's all there is to it, which means there's a lot of things missing from the system. But I decided it was best to do the simple thing1 and leave the more complex details of the module system for a later phase.
Oh, one more trick: if the module file is not found, Hel tries to import a Scheme module with the given name. So you can actually say import chezscheme and get all the bindings from the host Scheme. (Except some of the names are inacessible, since there is currently no way to use ? or - in Hel identifiers. We'll see how to fix that in the future.
Incidentally, I also started an attempt to split the interpreter (a single 1420-line Scheme file) into modules. I still haven't merged those changes into the master repository, and I'm still not sure if it's a good idea. In principle it'd be great for organization. The problem is that the RnRS/Chez module system is annoying to use.
For instance, you have to list all bindings you want to export in the library declaration. This is especially annoying for records. For example, if you declare a record:
(define-record-type Foo (fields x y))
this will generate a record descriptor Foo, a constructor make-Foo, a type predicate Foo?, and two accessors Foo-x and Foo-y. That's all nice and fun, but you have to export each of the generated identifiers individually if you want to use them in other modules.
Another annoyance is that Chez does not seem to provide a mechanism to run the REPL from the environment of the module. You can switch the interaction environment to the exported bindings of a module, but there does not seem to be a way to switch to the environment within the module, to call non-exported functions, etc. The workaround I found was to split all modules into a library definition file (say, utils.sls), containing just:
(library (utils) (export binding1 binding2 binding3 ...) (import (chezscheme)) (include "utils.scm"))
and the module code proper, in a separate file utils.scm. In this way, I can load the module code directly in Geiser or in the REPL, outside the module system. Note also that the the library definition file only imports (chezscheme) (so we can use the include form); all other imports are directly in the .scm file, so the .scm file will load properly by itself.
Even so, it is annoying to reload libraries, because you have to reload the users of each library manually too.
A smaller annoyance is that the code takes longer to compile when split into libraries. This is not a problem if you compile before execution, but makes running the code without a separate compilation step (chezscheme --script hel.scm) slower to start.
Yet another annoyance is that in the R6RS library syntax, all definitions must precede all expressions, so you have to move initialization code to the end of the module. [Addendum: this (mis)feature does not seem to be shared by R7RS library syntax. As much as I've learned to appreciate many good aspects of R6RS, it seems to me that library syntax is just better in R7RS.]
In the end, a middle-ground solution may be to avoid R6RS libraries entirely, and just create a single main file which includes the others, all in the same namespace. It's not as elegant, but it makes development easier. [Addendum: one benefit of the .sls/.scm split is that it's easy to switch to the non-library organization by just including all .scm files directly and ignoring the .sls files.]
When you write import foo/bar, where to look for the foo/bar.hel file? Currently the interpreter looks in the current directory, but that's far from ideal. A better option would be to search relative to the file where the import occurs. That would be an improvement, but still somewhat annoying: if I have a project with files foo.hel, dir1/bar.hel and dir2/baz.hel, I want to be able to load either of these files individually in the REPL and for each module to be able to import any other module in the project using the same name. What I really want is a notion of a project root to search from. One possibility would be to have a __project__.hel file (or something similar) at the project root. When looking for imports, the implementation tries to find the __project__.hel file up the directory hierarchy. If it's found, the directory where the file is is the project root. If not, the project root is the directory where the importing file is. This is vaguely similar to Python's __main__.py, except there would be only one project file per project (not per directory, which would destroy the idea of a single project root).
There is still no syntax to import individual bindings from a module, i.e., the equivalent of Python's from mod import foo, bar. Maybe we can just use Python's syntax (except (foo, bar) would have to be in parentheses, due to restrictions of Hel's syntax).
There is also no syntax to import all bindings from a module, i.e., Python's from foo import *; we can't use * because that's an infix operator, and the syntax doesn't and won't special-case individual commands (remember that one of the goals of the syntax is not to have hardcoded keywords). Maybe from foo import all(), and also things like from foo import except(foo, bar). I don't know.
Why foo/bar instead of foo.bar? Because I thought that import foo.bar might give the impression that the bindings are to be accessed as foo.bar.hello() (like Python) instead of just bar.hello() (as Hel does). And why I wanted this semantics? Because I was unsure what foo would be when you import foo.bar: a module containing just bar? What if I import foo later? What if foo contains a binding bar itself? Does the module foo have to exist for me to be able to import foo.bar? To avoid all these questions ("do the simple thing"), I decided it would be simpler to import the module without having to deal with the whole hierarchy, and make it available as just bar; and I thought the syntax with / suggested that better.
_____
1 "When in doubt, do the simple thing" has been a sort of mantra in this project. This has helped me avoid analysis paralysis and keep making progress, even though I know eventually I will have to go back and change/improve things. (Note though that the mantra is "do the simple thing", not "do the simplest thing".)
Hel got a preliminary version of its main looping and non-local control flow primitives today: do, redo and return. They have characteristics similar to Common Lisp's block/return-from, Scheme's named let, and Clojure's loop/recur (and, one might say, Java's labeled blocks, continues and breaks), though they are not exactly the same as any of these. In this post, I will describe how they work.
do creates a labeled block with parameters and initial values. It has the syntax:
do name(var1=value1, var2=value2, ...) {
body
}
What this does is to evaluate body in an environment containing the specified variables with the given values. The variable declaration section is like a function parameter declaration where all parameters are given default values. For example:
do block(x=1, y=2) {
x+y
}
will return 3.
Within the block, name is bound to a tag for the block. This tag can be used with the redo and return commands.
redo can be used to repeat the named block, with new values for the block variables. For example:
# Print all integers from 1 to `limit`.
let count_until(limit) = {
do block(i=1) { # First iteration will run with `i` = 1.
if i <= limit { # If we have not reached the limit yet...
print(i) # Print the current value of `i`...
redo block(i=i+1) # And repeat the block, with a new value of `i`.
}
}
}
This is analogous to Clojure's recur, except it does not have to be in tail position, and you can specify the label of the block you want to repeat (so you can have nested blocks and escape to outermost ones).
This is also similar to Scheme's named let, except that the new execution of the block replaces the current one, rather than behaving like a regular function call.
The names of the parameters in the redo call are optional; we could have written redo block(i+1) instead of redo block(i=i+1). This is analogous to the function call syntax.
return can be used to return a value immediately from a block. For example, suppose we have a foreach function which takes a list and a function, and applies the function to each element of the list in order:
let foreach(list, f) = {
do block(list=list) { # Start iterating with the full list
if list != [] { # If the list is not empty yet...
f(list.first) # Apply the function to the first element...
redo block(list=list.rest) # And repeat the block for the remaining ones.
}
}
}
Now we want to write a function to test if a given element is in a list. We want to reuse foreach to do the iteration, but we want to stop the iteration (and get out of foreach immediately) when we find the element in the list. We can do this with return:
let is_member(searched, list) = {
do out() {
# Call `foreach` with an anonymous function, which will be called
# for each element of the list.
foreach(list, fn (item) {
if item == searched { # If the current element is the one we are searching...
return true from out # Return `true` immediately from the `out` block.
}
})
# If we got here, it's because the element was not found.
return false from out
}
}
These constructs can be compared to Java's labeled blocks, continues and breaks. However, Hel blocks take parameters, which must be specified when redoing them (the equivalent of continue); and Hel blocks return a value, which must be specified when returning from them (the equivalent of break).
Common Lisp has the notion of a default block (which is the block labelled nil). Some constructs, like return, return from the default block, so you can avoid naming the block if you are only using one. It would be nice to have something similar in Hel.
Currently the parameter/argument binding logic for blocks is the same one used for functions. This means that if one of the block's arguments is omitted from the redo call, it will acquire the initial value specified in the beginning of the block! This is most likely not what you want. Alternative behaviours would be to forbid omitting block arguments, or reusing the value in the current iteration rather than the initial value.
Perhaps instead of using special forms for redo and return, these could be methods of the tag object, so we would write, for example, block.redo(i=i+1) instead of redo block(i=i+1), and block.return(42) rather than return 42 from block. I like the special form better, especially for redo because the block name stays together with the arguments just like in the block declaration. It also allows the possibility of omitting the block name if we get default blocks in the future.
[Despite the date, this is not an April Fool's joke. This is mostly a mind dump for future reference.]
I have written about noun-centric vs. verb-centric OO before (in Portuguese), but the question surfaces now in the context of Hel's design.
Most mainstream OO programming languages are noun-centric: methods (verbs) belong to objects (nouns). When calling x.foo(y), the method to be called is determined by the (dynamic) class of x; the call can be conceptualized as sending the message foo(y) to the object x.
By contrast, Common Lisp and other languages influenced by the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) are verb-centric: methods (verbs) are entities in their own right, which can be applied to objects (nouns). Methods of the same name are grouped under a generic function. The method calling syntax is typically the same as the regular function call syntax: (foo x y). The method invoked by a call to a generic function is determined by the (dynamic) classes of all arguments, not just x. New methods can be defined at any time, since they are independent from the class. The class definition, on the other hand, contains just the fields and the superclasses (and metaclass, and those sorts of thing), but no methods.
In Dylan, x.foo(y) is syntactic sugar for foo(x, y). This way you can have both the familiar method call notation and the verb-centric nature of CLOS.
Now, everything in language design is tradeoffs, and here we have some.
One of the main differences between the noun-centric and verb-centric models is in how they define namespaces for methods.
Suppose we define a File class in a module, with a method size() returning the file's size in bytes. In another module, we define a Circle class, with a method size() returning the circle's size in pixels. (Okay, we could have called the circle method radius or diameter(), but let's suppose the module was written by someone else and we don't control the name.)
In noun-centric OO, the class creates a namespace for its methods. someFile.size() and someCircle.size() are entirely different methods, because someFile and someCircle belong to different classes. By contrast, in verb-centric OO, these calls would be syntactic sugar for size(someFile) and size(someCircle); this would only work if there was a single generic function size encompassing both methods, which does not make much sense in this example (since size means something completely different in each class).
Common Lisp solves this problem by having the names belong to packages: variable names are symbols, and each symbol belongs to a package. In this case, each module/package would have its own symbol size, and there would be two distinct generic functions, both named size, but each by a distinct size. Due to the way the package system works in Common Lisp, you would not be able to import both at the same time: you would have to use a fully qualified symbol name to refer to at least one of them.
Guile does something different: if you import two generic functions with the same name into a module, they are merged into a new generic function combining the methods of both. In this case, even though each module defines its own generic function size, a module importing both would see a single generic function size which would accept both files and circles. May seem a bit weird from a conceptual standpoint, but it works nicely. Without Guile's trickery, the Schemely solution would be to rename one (or both) of the functions when importing (the equivalent of Python's from file import size as file_size). I don't know how Dylan handles this situation.
The flip side is that noun-centric OO provides a single namespace for all of a class' methods. This means that you have to be careful about overriding methods in subclasses. Suppose someone defines a class A and I create a subclass B inheriting from A and define a method foo on it. In the future, the author of class A decides to add a method foo to A. Now my class B inadvertently overrides the foo method of the superclass, just because it happens to have the same name as A's new foo method. Some noun-centric OO languages like C# require the explicit use of an override keyword on overriding methods to avoid this kind of accidental override. By contrast, in the CLOS world, my definition of the generic function foo would be unrelated to the new foo created by class A's author, so no conflict would ensue. (A package import conflict might happen, though. And if all of the symbols in the package where A is defined are imported into the package where B is defined, you might end up using the same symbol for both foos without even realizing. Yeah, packages are fun like that. But at least it's possible to have two different, non-conflicting foo methods.)
Another way in which noun-centric OO provides a namespace for methods is by separating method names from regular variables. This means I can write let size = file.size() without losing access to the size method. In Common Lisp this problem does not arise because functions/methods live in a different namespace from regular variables anyway, but I'm not willing to go that route. In Scheme, the local size would shadow the global method. (Again, I don't know how Dylan handles this.)
Yet another consequence of the namespacing thing is that, in the noun-centric model, you don't have to import a class' methods individually: if you have access to the class, you have access to all of its (public) methods. In the verb-centric model, generic functions are independent entities, and would have to be imported individually (or else you import all of them at once by importing the whole module (the equivalent of Python's from foo import *), thus polluting your module's namespace).
A possible counter-argument against the noun-centric model is that importing all of a class' methods is kind of an illusion: there are typically functions taking objects of a given class as arguments which are not methods of the class, and those would have to be imported manually anyway. In practice, though, the most common operations on a given object will be methods of the object, so this argument may not be very strong.
The last point brings an advantage of the verb-centric model: you can 'add' methods to a class without modifying its source, since the methods are independent entities that can be defined anywhere, just like regular functions. Some languages, such as Ruby, have "open classes" to which methods can be added at any time. One problem with this is that no matter where the method definitions are for a given class, they all share the same method namespace, so conflicts may happen more often. The other problem is that the set of methods available in a class depends on which modules have been loaded. This is also the case in the verb-centric model, but at least it's completely explicit: you only have access to a method if you import it. In the Ruby model, you see every method in a class regardless of where it was defined, which may create implicit module dependencies (i.e., I use a method defined elsewhere, but I don't import the defining module explicitly, it just happens to be available by the time my code runs).
If I understand correctly, Haskell's typeclasses offer an alternative model: you can instantiate a typeclass (i.e., implement an interface) anywhere, and even implement the same interface multiple times in different ways, but you only see the implementations if you import the implementing module. Transplanting this model to class definition, you might be able to add methods to a class anywhere, but would only see the new methods if you import the defining module. I'm not sure this would work; it seems plausible in a static world, but not really when you can obtain an object from anywhere and call a method on it without knowing its type (or worse, via reflection).
I intend to implement a rudimentary object model for Hel soon. I'm leaning towards plain old noun-centric OO, if only because it's easier to reach a class' methods (you don't have to import each method individually), and because it limits conflicts between local variables and method names. Let's see how it goes.
Hel acquired Python-like named parameters yesterday. This means that if you declare a function like:
let f(x, y) = x+y
you can call it as f(2, 3), or f(x=2, y=3), or f(2, y=3). It also got (also Python-like) rest parameters, i.e., you can declare a parameter like *args to collect all positional (non-named) arguments not captured by a previous parameter, and **kwargs to capture all named arguments not captured by a previous parameter.
(Unlike Python, the resulting kwargs variable is a list of (name, value) tuples, but that's because Hel does not have dictionaries yet. Also, I still have to implement support for *x and **x syntax at the call site, rather than just at function declaration site.)
But I wonder if this is the best approach to named parameters in Hel:
By allowing any parameter to be passed by name, all parameter names become part of the function's API, whether the programmer wants it or not. You cannot change the name of a function parameter without wondering if some other code depends on it.
This also means that the parameter names become part of the type of the function: fn (x) x+1 and fn (y) y+1 don't have the same type, because one of them can be called like f(x=5) and the other can't.
Currently Hel is interpreted, but I plan to make it compilable at some point. Having multiple ways to call the same function, when the function is not necessarily in the same module / known at compile time and might have been passed around as an argument, may make function calling conventions more complicated and more expensive.
So, are there alternatives for handling named parameters better suited to Hel's goals out there?
Plenty of languages get by without named parameters at all, but that's not really what I'm after.
In Common Lisp, functions have positional and keyword (named) parameters, but any given parameter is either positional or keyword: if you declare a function like (defun f (x y &key z) ...), you can call it like (f 1 2 :z 3), but not like (f :x 1 :y 2 :z 3). This means the function controls whether the name of a parameter is exposed or not (and actually the keyword exposed by the function need not be the same as the variable name used internally to store its value).
This makes the calling convention simpler. Conceptually, a function receives a list of arguments; keywords like :x are just values, and keyword arguments are just extra keyword value sequences in the list. An argument list can be assembled programmatically and passed to a function via apply. The call site (from an implementation point of view) does not need to know the function signature beforehand to call it. (Of course, performance is usually better when it does know the signature beforehand.)
One downside of this is that because keywords are plain values, it is easy to pass one as a positional argument by mistake, especially if the function supports both optional and keyword arguments. For example, if a function is declared (defun f (a &optional b c &key d) ...), calling (f 1 :c 2) will actually pass :c as the value for b, and 2 as the value for c. For this reason, it is considered good practice[by whom?] not to use both optional and keyword arguments in the same function.
The other downside is that sometimes we do want to be able to pass the same arguments either with or without names. I feel this is especially the case with constructors, where I want to be able to call either Person(name="Hildur", age=23) or Person("Hildur", 23). I don't know. Constructors also have the characteristic that the parameter names are usually part of the interface anyway, because they are the same as the names of the object accessors.
Dylan seems to use the same scheme (heh) as Common Lisp.
Standard Scheme only supports positional parameters and a mechanism to collect rest arguments (like Python's *args) in a list. The various Scheme implementations tend to support variations of Common Lisp style argument lists.
In Smalltalk and Objective-C, the parameter names are part of the name of a method. Using an example from Wikipedia, when you write:
'hello world' indexOf: $o startingAt: 6
the method is actually called indexOf:startingAt:, with the arguments interspersed with the name. This means all arguments are named, and it also means they cannot be reordered or omitted (though you can define a different method with different arguments, for example a separate indexOf: method, thus simulating optional arguments).
Swift is somewhat similar: by default, all parameters have a label, which must be used when calling the function; however, in Swift you can specify _ as the label to omit it. Arguments also have a fixed order. The parameter labels appear to be considered part of the function name too, so you can have different declarations of the same function name with different parameter labels. Argument names are not part of the type. I'm not sure how you specify which of multiple functions with different argument labels you want to refer to when using a function as a value.
In Elixir, passing the last arguments of a function call in the form key: value, key: value, ... is syntactic sugar for passing a list [key: value, key: value, ...], which is itself syntactic sugar for a list of tuples [{:key, value}, {:key, value}, ...]. By the magic of pattern matching, if you do the same thing in the function parameter declaration, it will turn into a pattern that will match the list of tuples passed in as argument. But this also means that the list must be in the same order in the declaration and the call, and also means that the keywords are not optional. Alternatively, one can receive the whole list and parse it manually (or semi-manually with the help of a dictionary).
Ruby pre-2.0 seems to work similarly, except you get a dictionary instead of a list of pairs. Ruby 2.0 and after has actual keyword parameters. Unlike Python, a parameter is either positional or keyword; it cannot be called both ways.
Clojure's approach is a mix of Common Lisp and Elixir: to support keyword parameters, you declare a rest parameter which will collect the sequence of :keyword value items, but instead of specifying a variable as the parameter to receive the list, you can specify a dictionary pattern to destructure the list. The syntax is not exactly awesome, especially when declaring default values for the keys, but it works.
Ada is like Python in allowing any parameter to be passed by name or by position, as the caller desires. The names don't seem to be part of the type, so I don't know how the language handles named arguments when using a function as a value.
There is no real conclusion here. I will keep the Python-style calls for now, but I have to think more about this.
Hel got macros today. That came about through a different (and simpler) route than I had envisioned; today I'm going to ramble a bit about it.
As I described previously, I decided to abandon Lisp syntax and experiment with a more conventional syntax, while trying to preserve the flexibility to define new commands that looked just like the builtin ones (such as if, for, etc).
Because the new syntax was more complicated than Lisp's atoms and lists, I thought Lisp-style procedural macros would not be very convenient to use in the new language. So from the start, I had the idea of providing template-based macros (a la Scheme's syntax-rules) to match the various syntactic forms and describe replacements. I've been struggling with the problem of finding a good notation for matching pieces of code [all the while looking at Rust and Dylan for inspiration], with unsatisfying results. Meanwhile, I have been working on simpler parts of the language, such as adding support for defining functions, if/then/else, and such.
Yesterday I tackled various other low-hanging fruit problems, such as adding preliminary support for lists, tuples, indexing (list[i]), strings, and records. Rather than reinventing a record structure, I implemented Hel records in terms of R6RS records1. One consequence of this is that Hel programs can manipulate not only their own record types, but also the records of the host Scheme implementation.
Once I had that, I realized I could just drop the record types for the AST into the Hel standard environment, and now I could manipulate syntax trees from Hel! By this point, I could write functions taking a syntax tree as an argument and returning a syntax tree as a result. This is basically what a macro is. All I needed then was a way to mark those functions as macros, so that the interpreter could identify them as such and call them with the unevaluated syntax tree as an argument, rather than the evaluated arguments (i.e., so that m(x+y) is called with the syntax tree for x+y rather than the result of calculating x+y).
* * *
What I did when I dropped the AST constructors in the Hel environment was, in a sense, making Hel homoiconic (although not with a code representation as direct as Lisp's, and some would argue that this does not count as true homoiconicity; it does not really matter). Although this is somewhat obvious (I exposed the syntax tree types, therefore I can manipulate syntax trees), there is a difference between a formal/logical understanding and an intuitive understanding of something; and seeing the immediate power that something as simple as exposing the language's syntax tree to itself yielded was eye-opening, even though I have programmed in a language with exposed syntax trees as its hallmark feature for years – I guess this so normal in Lisp you eventually take it for granted, and don't really think about how magic this is.
The most surprising part of this for me was how easy it was to add this power to the language: just expose the AST constructors, add half a dozen lines to the interpreter to recognize macro calls, and bam!, we have macros and homoiconicity. I started wondering why more modern interpreted languages don't expose their ASTs in the same way. I think there are a number of factors in the answer. One of them perhaps is the fact that most of the popular scritping languages are implemented in C, and in C it would take special effort to expose the AST to the interpreted language, compared to (R6RS) Scheme where I was able to easily implement generic support for exposing any record/struct types from the host language to the interpreted language. Reflection was a big win here. (I'm not clear how much dynamic typing had a fundamental role in making this easy too. Perhaps it would be possible to do in a statically-typed host language too, but I wonder how easy would it be; it certainly seems it would not be as easy, but that's something I have to think harder about.)
Another factor is that the Hel syntax tree, although more complex than Lisp, is still much simpler than the typical programming language, by design. There were only eight AST constructors to expose to the interpreted language: Phrase, Constant, Identifier, Tuple, Array, Block, Call, and Index. (In the current version there is an extra node, Body, which is used for the whole program and as the content of a Block; I expect to remove it from the exposed AST in the future, since it's just a list of phrases.) Infix and prefix operators are internally converted to Call nodes, with the operator as the callee and the operands as arguments. There is still room for simplification: Call and Index (i.e., f(x, y) and v[i, j]) have essentially the same fields and might be unified in some way; and Tuple and Array might be unified in a single Sequence node. I don't know to what extent this is desirable, though.
By contrast, Python, for example, does expose its AST, but it has a huge set of syntax nodes, and its representation can change with each Python release. Of course this is a danger for Hel too: once the AST is exposed, it's harder to change without breaking client code. Some abstraction mechanism might be necessary to allow evolution of the AST representation without breaking everyone's macros. On the other hand, the Hel AST is much less likely to change, since new language constructs don't generally require changing the AST.
Although it's already possible to write macros in Hel, a pattern-matching interface would still be more convenient to use than directly manipulating the syntax nodes. However, it might be easier to implement the pattern-matching interface as a macro, in Hel, in terms of the current procedural interface, than as special code in the interpreter.
The other problem to handle is hygiene: how to keep track of the correct binding each identifier points to, and how this information is exposed in the AST. I still have to think about this.
_____
1 And although I have spoken unfavorably about R6RS in the past, I'm glad for its procedural interface for record creation and inspection. I think I have some more good things to say on R6RS in the future.
For a while I have been trying to design a nice Lisp-based syntax for Hel, trying to fit things like type information and default arguments in function definitions, devising a good syntax for object properties, etc., but never being satisfied with what I come up with. So a few days ago I decided to try something else entirely: to devise a non-Lisp syntax while maintaining a similar level of flexibility to define new language constructs. And I think I have come up with something quite palatable, though there are a few open problems to solve.
The idea is not entirely new. I know of at least Elixir, which is homoiconic but has more variety/flexibility in its syntax, though it has a bunch of hardcoded reserved words; and Dylan, which seems to have a pretty complex macro system, though maybe a little more complex than I'd wish. My non-Lisp Hel syntax has a bunch of hardcoded symbols (( ) [ ] { } , ; and newline), and the syntax for numbers and identifiers is hardcoded too (but that is hardcoded even in Lisp, though Common Lisp has reader macros to overcome this problem to an extent), but there are no reserved keywords, and I find it easier to read and analyze than Dylan. I hope you like it too (though feel free to comment in any case).
if x > 0 {
print("foo")
return x*2
} else {
print("bar")
return x*3
}
That looks like a pretty regular language, but the magic here is that none of the "keywords" is hardcoded. This is interpreted as a command if with the four arguments x > 0, the first block, else, and the second block. It is up to the operator/macro bound to the variable if to decide what to do with these arguments.
There are some caveats here, the most notable one being that the else must appear in the same line as the closing brace of the first block, otherwise it would be interpreted as an independent command rather than a part of the if command. I think this is an acceptable price to pay for the flexibility of not having a limited, hardcoded set of commands.
The central component of the syntax is the command, or perhaps more precisely the phrase, since "command" gives the impression of a separation between statements and expressions which does not really exist in the syntax. A phrase is a sequence of space-separated constituents. A constituent is one of:
The arguments of a function call, indexing operation, parenthesized expression, and the elements of tuples and arrays are themselves phrases (i.e., you can have an if inside a function call).
Parsing of constituents is greedy. When looking at a series of tokens such as if x > 0 { ... } and trying to determine where a consituent ends and the next one starts, the parser will consider each consituent to be the longest sequence of tokens from left to right that can be validly interpreted as a constituent. In this example:
Phrases are separated by newlines or semicolons. To avoid the effect of a newline, a \ can be used at the end of the line (as in Python). Within parentheses or brackets, newlines are ignored (also as in Python).
That's pretty much all there is to it, in general lines. Except...
An operator is any sequence of one or more of the characters ! @ $ % ^ & * - + = : . < > / ? | ~. So + and * are operators, but so are ++ and |> and @.@.
One open problem with this syntax is how to handle operator precedence in a general way. In my current prototype, I have hardcoded the precedence of the arithmetic operators, but I need to have sane precedence rules for user-defined operators.
One way is to allow the user to specify the precedence for custom operators (like the infixl and infixr declarations in Haskell). The problem is that this means a program cannot be parsed without interpreting the fixity declarations, which I find annoying, especially given that operators can be imported from other modules, and being unable to parse (read in Lisp parlance) a program without compiling the dependencies is deeply annoying from a Lisp perspective. Another problem is that it is not only hard to parse for the parser, it's hard to parse for the human too.
Another way is to have a fixed rule to assign each operator a precedence. I remember seeing a language once which gave each operator a precedence based on its first character (so, for example, *.* would have the same precedence as *). [Update: I don't remember which language it was, but it turns out that Scala does the same.] I like this solution a lot because it's easy for the human to know the precedence of an operator they've never seen before. The problem is reconciling this with the natural precedences expected from some operators (for instance, = and == usually have different precedences). I still have to think about this. Suggestions are welcome.
[Update: Maybe it makes more sense for the last character to determine precedence, since we want things like += to have the same precedence as =. On the other hand, an operator like => makes more sense as having the same precedence as = than >. Don't = and > have the same precedence anyway, though, since == and > do?]
The consituent parsing rules may cause some surprises. Consider the following example:
let answer = if x > 0 { 23 } else { 42 }
In principle, this looks like assigning the result of the if to the variable answer. However, the parsing rules as stated above will lead to this being parsed as the sequence of constituents:
which is not quite what was intended. To use the if expression (which is a whole phrase, not a constituent) as the right-hand side of =, one would have to surround it with parentheses.
The arguments of a function call are phrases, not constituents, so an if expression can appear as the argument of a function call without having to surround it with an extra pair of parentheses on the top of those already required by the function call. But function arguments are delimited by commas, so, to avoid ambiguity, commas are not allowed to appear outside parentheses. For example, you cannot have a command like:
for x, y in items { ... }
because in a function call like:
f(for x, y in items { ... })
it would be ambiguous whether this is a single argument or two. The solution is to require:
for (x, y) in items { ... }
instead.
This also means that import foo, bar must be import (foo, bar) instead, though this limitation might be lifted outside parentheses.
A space cannot appear between a function and its argument list. The reason is that we don't want for (x, y) in list to be interpreted as containing a function call for(x, y), nor do we want for x in (1, 2, 3) to be interpreted as containing a call in(1, 2, 3). I don't typically write spaces between a function and its arguments anyway, but I feel ambivalent about this space sensitivity. Perhaps the most important thing here (and in the above gotchas as well) is to have good error messages and (optional, on by default) warnings when things go wrong. For example, upon seeing something that might be a function call with a spurious space inside:
foo.hel:13: error: `foo` is not a command foo.hel:13: hint: don't put spaces between a function and its argument list 13 foo (x, y)
This might be harder for the macros (e.g., for identifying that the call in(1, 2, 3) it received as argument was meant to be two separate constituents), but I think it can be done, especially for rule-based macros (as opposed to procedural ones).
A different solution is to get rid of tuples entirely and use for [x, y] instead, except this does not really solve the problem because this is ambiguous with the indexing operation.
I already have a prototype parser, but it's pretty rough, and I still have to work on the interpreter, so I have not published it yet. If you have comments, suggestions, constructive criticism, or two cents to give, feel free to comment.
2019 might just be the year of Hel on the desktop. I mean, not really, but I would like to talk a bit about my prospects for Hel going forward.
For those who don't know, Hel (huangho's Experimental Language/Lisp) is my playground for experimenting with programming language design and implementation ideas. The Hel 0.1 compiler was a very crude translator from a simple Lisp-like language to C, similar in spirit to lows. Hel 0.2 was a bit of an improvement, in that it at least had the rudiments of an intermediate representation. The goal for Hel 0.2 was to be a superset of a subset of R5RS Scheme (i.e., Hel and R5RS would have a common subset), and the compiler itself would be written mostly in this subset; the idea was to eventually be able to compile the Hel compiler with either a Scheme implementation or with the Hel compiler itself, thus bootstrapping the language (i.e., being able to compile the compiler with itself).
My goals have changed a bit, though. First of all, I'm now interested in exploring more the language side rather than the implementation side of the project. I think an interpreter might serve my goals better than a compiler, since it is easier to change and test ideas. The compiler can come later.
Second, I'm not so keen anymore in having a large common subset with Scheme. Multi-shot continuations (call/cc) have always been out of the subset, but as of late I'm willing to question things as basic as cons cells. I may not get that far away from Scheme, but when exploring design options I definitely don't want to be constrained by compatibility. So bootstrappability can come later too.
Third, because I want to write an interpreter, but I don't want it to be terribly slow, I'll probably be switching implementation platform. So far I had been doing development on GNU Guile, but I'll probably switch to either Chez Scheme (a pretty fast R6RS Scheme implementation), or SBCL (a pretty fast Common Lisp implementation). SBCL has the advantage of having more libraries available (and Common Lisp itself is a larger language than that provided by Chez), while Chez has the advantage of being (in principle) closer to Hel (although that's kind of moot if bootstrapping is not an immediate goal anymore). I thought SBCL would also be faster than Chez, but in my highly scientific benchmark (running (fib 45) on each implementation), Chez is actually faster out of the box, though SBCL is faster if type declarations are provided.
So what are my goals for Hel 0.3? Well:
Implementation-wise, one of my major goals is debuggability. I want to have a Lisp which can give proper stack traces, with proper line numbers, in the presence of macros, and show function arguments in the stack trace.
Language-wise, I want:
Optional types, with a lightweight syntax for type declarations;
Explicit indication of mutability, with more things immutable by default (strings, lists). Mutability is an always-present part of APIs in Scheme and Common Lisp (both language standards are very explicit in describing data sharing between function arguments and results, which values can or cannot be mutated, etc.); I think this really ought to be more explicit in the data types themselves. I have described a proposal for handling mutability before, but nowadays I'm more inclined to simply have mutable and immutable variants of lists, dictionaries and such; it's less elegant but easier to implement and use efficiently. We'll see how this goes. The important thing is to make mutability explicit in the data types (and their printed representation).
A concise notation for declaring and using new data types, reading and printing them, doing pattern matching, reflection, etc., to reduce the temptation to Use Lists For Everything™.
There are other things (some of which I intend to write about in the future), but I think these are the most important ones.
Wish everyone a happy new year, and may our living-dead open source projects thrive in 2019.
In the previous post I discussed an idea for dealing with mutable data in a Lisp-like programming language by using mutable boxes and immutable everything-else, with a bunch of optimizations. One of the usual suspects asked me what was the advantage of this scheme over just declaring things const as one would in a language like C/C++. At first I did not have an answer ready. This is one of those situations where you are so stuck in your own perspective that some questions don't even occur to you.1 The immediate answer was that I was thinking in the context of a dynamically-typed language, so an immutability declaration like const2 was out of the picture. But there is more to it.
If I were to give a really complete answer, I would have to begin answering why I want dynamic rather than static typing. I started this post originally by trying to explain exactly that, but there is way more to say about it than I have the energy to do right now. For now let's just take for granted that I'm designing this framework in the context of a dynamically-typed languaged.
But I could still have a dynamically-typed equivalent of the const declaration: just shift the constness to the dynamic type of the object. So vectors and other composite objects would have a flag indicating whether they are mutable or not. I discussed this possibility at the end of the previous post, but I also commented I didn't find that solution as satisfying. But why not?
One thing I like about the mutability-as-boxes model is that it seems to makes it easier to think "equationally" about mutability: instead of mutability being an inherent property of vectors (and other data structures), mutability is an 'embellishment' which can be added to any data structure (by putting it into a box), and it seems more or less obvious (to me, anyway) what will be the expected behavior when adding or removing mutability from something (or rather, when adding or removing something from mutability). For example, if vectors were inherently mutable or immutable, then I have to know what operations exist to convert one type into the other, and what happens to the original (if I make an immutable vector out of the mutable one, will the new vector reflect further changes in the original (like a C const reference), or is it an independent, never-changing copy?). Of course, when you learned the programming language you would learn about those details and be done with it, but the boxes model seems to suggest the answers by itself: if I extract a vector (immutable, like all vectors) from a mutable box, I would expect that further changes to the box contents won't affect the vector I just extracted (because changing the box contents means replacing one vector with another, not changing the vector itself); and if I have an (immutable) vector v around and I put it inside a box, I would expect that further changes to the box contents won't affect my original v (for the same reason: if I change the box contents, I'm replacing v with a new vector, so it's not v anymore). In fact, in the previous post I have mostly wondered about how to implement the model efficiently, rather than what the correct behavior of each operation should be, because that part did not seem to raise any questions.
There is a flip side to this: although it is easier (to me, anyway) to think about the semantics of the mutability operations, the optimizations required to make it work well make it harder to think about the performance of the written code. That's the sufficiently smart compiler problem: a sufficiently smart compiler (or runtime) can turn something that would in principle be expensive into something fast, but then you change a small thing in your code in a way that the optimization cannot handle, and suddenly the performance of your program drastically changes. You end up having to know which cases the implementation can optimize, which makes up for the semantic simplicity. Unless you can make sure the optimization will handle all 'reasonable' cases (for varying values of 'reasonable'), this can be a problem.
Object equality is a more complicated concept than one might expect. There are multiple notions of equality around – some languages have multiple operators for different kinds of equality (for example, == and === in JavaScript, or eq?, eqv? and equal? in Scheme). One type of equality that's given particular prominence in Scheme is the idea of object equivalence, embodied in the eqv? predicate: two objects are equivalent iff no operation (other than the equality predicates themselves) can tell them apart. Mutability is particularly important for object equivalence: two mutable objects (say, two vectors [1 2 3] and [1 2 3]), unless they are one and the same object in memory, are never equivalent, even if they have the same contents, because you can tell them apart by modifying one and seeing if the other changes as well (i.e., they might cease from having the same contents in the future). On the other hand, two immutable objects of the same type and with the same contents are equivalent, because there is in principle no operation that can tell them apart. (Of course the implementation might provide a function to return the address of each object in memory, which would allow us to tell the objects apart. But let's not concern ourselves with that.) Another notion of equality is that of equality of contents, embodied in the equal? predicate: two objects are equal if they are of the same type and have the same contents, even if they are mutable.
When you have a lookup data structure such as a dictionary, you have to decide which kind of equality you will use to compare the keys in the data structure with the key being looked up. Scheme hash table implementations typically require one to specify the equality operator explicitly, because strings are mutable, so you want equal? if your keys are strings, but in other cases you may want to distinguish objects that are not equivalent in the above sense, so you want eqv?.
But if you make strings and vectors immutable, you can compare them with eqv?, and the cases where you want to actually use equal? for hash table lookup mostly go away. And you generally don't want mutable keys in your hash tables anyway (because if you mutate the object that was the original key, typically your hash table stops working because now the key changed but is still hashed under the old key's hash); we tolerate that in Scheme only because strings (and lists, and vectors) are mutable and we want to be able to use them as keys. So if mutability is isolated by boxes, now we can make hash table lookup use object equivalence (eqv?) by default and not worry about explicitly choosing the right predicate for hash table lookup. (Having a sensible default predicate for hash table lookup is important, among other cases, if you want to have literal syntax for hash tables, i.e., if you want to be able to write a literal hash table like {"foo": 1, "bar": 2} in your code without having to say "hey, by the way, the keys are compared by equal? in this case".)
You can still use boxes as keys in a hash table. But since boxes are mutable, a box is only eqv? to the very same object in memory, so you have to use the same box object as the key when you store a value in the table and when you look the value up. This is actually useful if you want to store information about the box itself rather than the contents. But what if I want to look up based on the box contents? Well, then you unbox the contents and look it up! Which expresses intent far better, if you ask me. (This is not entirely equivalent to an equal?-based hash table lookup because you may have boxes inside boxes which would all have to be unboxed to achieve the same effect. Not that this is a very common use case for hash table keys.)
Could we not do the same thing with the mutability flag model? In that model, eqv? would check the mutability flag; objects with the mutability flag on would only be equivalent if they were one and the same, and objects with the mutability flag off would be compared for contents. It would work, but would not be as pretty, if you ask me. However, as long as mutability is easily visible (for example, mutable objects would be printed differently, say like ~[1 2 3] if the mutability flag is on), it could work fine.
In Scheme, variables are mutable: you can use (set! var value) on them to change their values. The problem is, variables are not first-class entities in Scheme, so you cannot pass them around directly. So if you want to share mutable state across functions, you have to put the variable in some place where all the interested functions can see it; I remember once having moved subfunctions into another function just so they could all share the same mutable variable. Alternatively, you can create a mutable data structure and pass it around to the relevant functions – and the box is the simplest mutable data structure you can use, if all you want is to share one single mutable cell around. So mutable boxes are useful even if you don't intend to make them the one single source of mutation in the language. And since they are already there, why not just go ahead and do just that? (I am aware that "why not?" is not exactly the most compelling argument out there.)
Another case: cons-cell based lists are somewhat annoying to use with mutation. Suppose you have a list in a variable x, and you pass it around and it ends up in a variable y in another part of the program. If you append things to the tail of x by mutating the tail, both x and y will see the new items, because the tail is reachable from both x and y. But if you append things to the front of x, y won't see the new items in the front, because the new elements are not reachable from the old list tail. If you put the whole mutable list inside a box and passed the box around, both x and y would have the same view of the mutable object. And if you took the list out of the box and put it on another variable z, it would become immutable, so either you see the same changes to the list as everyone else, or you isolate yourself from all subsequent mutations, but it will not happen that you will see some changes to the (tail of the) list and not others (to the front).
I hope I have been able to show why I find the mutability-as-boxes model appealing. I'm not saying it does not have problems (on the contrary, I have already said it has problems), I'm just trying to show what is the point of the whole thing.
_____
1 This is kinda disturbing when you think about it. How many other questions am I not asking?
2 Well, const is not really about the immutability of the data, it's more about the permission to modify a piece of data from a given reference. That is, if a function is declared as taking a const char * argument, that means that the function is not supposed to modify the data pointed to, but it does not mean that the region will not be changed through other references. In other words, it's about requiring something from the user of the reference, but not about providing a guarantee to the user of the reference. A true immutability declaration would both forbid the user from modifying the data and ensure to them that the data will not change during use. Immutability in a language like Rust works like this (except immutable is the default, and mutability is explicitly declared).
I've been around lately with an idea for handling mutation in a new Lisp-like programming language. Most of these ideas are probably not new – in fact, while doing a little research I've found out about Clojure's transients, which embody some of the same ideas – and the parts that are possibly new are not necessary good. But I want to write this down for future reference, so there we go.
DISCLAIMER: This is one of those programming language design posts exploring a bunch of ideas and reaching no conclusion. Read at your own peril.
The problem with mutation is when the mutable data is shared with other parts of the program – especially when you don't know what parts of the program share the same data. For example, suppose you call a method blog_post.get_tags(), and it returns you a list ["comp", "prog", "lisp"] – can you mutate this list? For example, if I were to sort it, or remove elements from it, can I do it in-place, or I would be mutating a list used internally by the blog_post object and thus inadvertently affecting other parts of the program? Without looking at the method's source code, we don't know. If we wanted to be sure not to break anything, we would have to make a copy of the list and change the copy instead.
What if I am the person writing the get_tags() method? Should I always return a new copy of the list, wasting some memory and cycles but ensuring that whoever calls my function won't be able to affect the internal fields of the blog_post? Or should I always return the same list object, thus avoiding a new allocation but relying on the caller to do the right thing?
Now consider the strings inside that list. If I were to convert them to upper-case, should I do it in-place, or copy them first? In a language like C, this is the same problem as before: you have to know whether get_tags() gives you a copy of the original strings (which you can freely modify), or the internal strings used by blog_post (which you should not modify). But in a language like Java or Python, this problem does not come up: since strings are immutable in those languages, the only way to 'change' them is by making a new string, so modifying them in-place is not an option. On the other hand, the writer of the get_tags() method can now happily return the internal strings of the blog_post object, since they can be sure the strings cannot be modified by external code.
If you make all data structures immutable, you eliminate this problem – and that's the purely-functional approach, taken by languages like Haskell. Clojure is similar in making the core data types (such as lists, vectors and hashmaps) immutable, and having controlled forms of mutability. In traditional Lisps like Scheme and Common Lisp, on the other hand, most composite data types (including lists, vectors and strings) are mutable. The standards of those languages are careful in describing which functions always return freshly allocated data and which return values that may share parts with the function's arguments. This is basically part of the contract of those functions, which you have to know whenever you want to mutate values generated by them. The situation in traditional Lisps is somewhat aggravated by the fact that linked lists may share a tail: two lists (1 3 7 5) and (2 7 5) may actually share the same cons cells for the (7 5) part. In a mostly functional setting, this is okay, but if we want to mutate anything, we have to be extra careful not to be inadvertently changing something else. In this example, sorting the second list in place may end up messing the first list.
What I'm interested in is finding a middle ground between full immutability and full mutability. I want to be able to return immutable data from functions, so I can know the consumers of that data won't inadvertently change it, and I also want to be able to create mutable data which can be modified in place. It would also be nice to be able to use mutable data for temporary processing and make it immutable after we are ready. And I want to be able to tell at a glance if I'm dealing with mutable or immutable data.
So here is the idea…
First, we make all basic composite data types (lists, vectors, dictionaries, strings, etc.) immutable. Then we add a single mutable box type. Values of the box type have a single mutable field. This idea is at least as old as ML's ref type, so nothing new so far. I will use the notation &val to mean a box containing val, and the expression (set! box val) changes the contents of the box box to val. I will also use @ (read at) for the indexing function, so (@ vec idx) means the idxth element (starting at 0) from vector vec. (@ box) with no indices means to extract the box's contents.
So now we can make a mutable cell with an immutable vector inside, e.g., &[1 2 3]. We cannot mutate the vector directly, but we can replace the whole vector with another immutable vector. That may be elegant and all, but it's not as convenient as a mutable array, nor as efficient. There are some tricks we can play here, though.
The first trick is to make the assignment operator (set!) recognize vector indexing as its first argument, so if v is the vector-containing box &[1 2 3], we can write (set! (@ v 0) 42) to replace the vector [1 2 3] with the vector [42 2 3] inside the box. It looks like we are mutating the vector's first element, but actually we are replacing the whole original immutable vector with a new immutable vector with a different element at position 0.
This gets us convenience, but it's still inefficient: if I write a loop to mutate all elements of the vector, it will generate a fresh new vector on each iteration. But then comes the second trick: how can we tell the difference between a mutable cell with an immutable vector inside from an actual mutable vector? If we make the difference invisible to the programmer, then we can mutate the vector in-place as an optimization. So (set! (@ v 0) 42) syntactically looks like mutating a vector element, semantically means replacing the whole vector with a new one, but implementationally actually works by mutating the vector element anyway. I'm not sure about the wisdom of this double layer of self-cancelling illusions, but let's explore this idea further.
Let's call the naive implementation using a mutable box with an immutable vector inside, well, the naive implementation. And let's call the implementation which underlyingly uses a mutable vector to represent the box+vector combination the smart implementation (with the full understanding that it may actually be too smart for its own good, or maybe not smart enough to make this idea work well).
The most basic operation you can do with a box is extracting the contents. In the naive implementation, that's just returning the value inside. In the smart implementation, we must simulate this by copying the current contents of the mutable vector into a freshly allocated immutable vector and returning that. A user can then observe the difference between the two implementations by taking the contents of the same box twice and checking whether the results are eq? to each other, i.e., whether they are the same object in memory.
It seems to me that the solution to this problem is to ditch object identity for immutable objects from the language, i.e., get rid of the lower-level eq? operation (Python's is), or at least relegate it to a library of lower-level operations. Immutable objects should only be compared by its contents, not by identity: if I compare [1 2 3] with [1 2 3], it should not matter whether they are separate objects in memory or not: they have the same contents and that's what matters. The only way to tell two distinct objects with the same contents from each other (apart from eq?) is by mutating one of them and seeing if the other changes as well; but if the objects are immutable, this distinction disappears.
A possible optimization to reduce the amount of copying when extracting a box's contents is to return the actual underlying vector, but mark the box as copy-on-write, i.e., we postpone the copy to the next time we need to mutate the vector inside the box. If the box is not mutated afterwards, the vector is never copied. The problem with this may be performance: we need to check the copy-on-write flag before every change to the vector, and the whole point of these optimizations is performance. Sure, we avoid a copy, but we slow down every write to the vector. This is aggravated by the fact that this flag must be synchronized across threads, lest we end up with two threads making new copies and clobbering each others' view of the box.
Speaking of which, doesn't thread synchronization throw this whole idea out of the window anyway? Extracting the contents of a box must be an atomic operation, but someone might be mutating the underlying vector while we are copying it into a new immutable vector to return it. This is okay as long as we can guarantee that the resulting copy represents one possible atomic state of the box at the time of the extraction, but consider the following scenario:
b originally contains &[1 2 3 4 5].
(def v (@ b)). The implementation starts to copy the elements into a new immutable vector.
1, thread 2 evaluates (set! (@ b 0) 10). Now b is &[10 2 3 4 5]. Thread 1 keeps on with its copying.
(set! (@ b 4) 50). Now b is &[10 2 3 4 50].
[1 2 3 4 50].
[1 2 3 4 50] has never been a state of b: the only states b had were [1 2 3 4 5], [10 2 3 4 5], and [10 2 3 4 50]. Thus, the illusion that the box contains an immutable vector is broken.
To avoid this problem, the implementation would have to acquire a lock (or use some other form of thread synchronization) when extracting the contents of a box, thus slowing down what should be a cheap operation. The copy-on-write solution avoids the copy incoherence problem, because the copying happens from the now-immutable vector to the new mutable one, and not the opposite, so we know that the origin will not change mid-copy. But as we have seen, we need to ensure synchronization of the copy-on-write flag, so it's pretty much the same.
Maybe this synchronization requirement is a good thing: maybe we want copies to be atomic anyway, and this way the semantics of the language guarantees that. But maybe this is an unnecessary overhead most of the time.
Even if we go with the copy-on-extract solution, we can avoid copying in the case of extracting the object from the box and then discarding the box (e.g., if we want to create a mutable vector, do a bunch of mutating operations on it, and then make it immutable) by providing an (unbox! b) operation which returns the contents and sets the box contents to nil (or whatever other value to indicate that the box is "empty"). Because we know the vector will not be mutated again, we can just return the underlying vector and call it immutable. This is basically what Clojure's persistent! operation does (though I didn't know that when I had this idea).
Let's consider some other problems and optimizations.
What about sequences of transformations? For example, suppose I implement a filter function, which takes a predicate function and a vector and returns a new vector containing only the elements for which the predicate function returns true, like this:
(def (filter pred vec)
(let ([result &[]])
;; Collect satisfying items in the mutable result vector...
(for [item in vec]
(when (pred item)
(push! item result)))
;; And then return the contents as an immutable vector.
(unbox! result)))
What if I want to, say, filter a vector and then reverse it? If filter is written like this, I get an immutable vector back, so I would have to copy it into a mutable vector again just so I can reverse it. If only filter had not called unbox! at the end, I could have reversed it in-place without a new allocation! But if I don't unbox!, I will have to always manually unbox the result when I want to, and most of the time I do want an immutable result.
There is a possible trick to help us here: if we unbox a value just to immediately box it back again, we can actually keep using the same underlying storage with no copying. The problems with this optimization are: (1) We must be able to know that no other references to the object have been created between the unboxing and the re-boxing, and basically the only way to do this is with some sort of reference counting. Reference counting has its share of problems (cyclic data structures never reach count zero, we need to synchronize count updates across threads), so relying on an optimization which requires us to use reference counting is not good. (2) We need to make sure the reference count does not inadvertently rise above 1, which would preclude the optimization. Since there may be more going on under the scenes in the compiler/interpreter than reaches the eye, this would be an unreliable optimization, that sometimes does not trigger for non-obvious reasons.
An alternative to use reference counting would be to do this analysis at compile-time, either through some form of escape analysis (which is hard to do across functions), or some crazy type system with uniqueness types (like Rust's borrow checker), which does not mesh well with my goal of a dynamically typed language.
What if I put nested data inside a box, like &[[1 2] [3 4]]? Should the sub-vectors become underlyingly mutable too? If so, when should we stop recursing through the structure, which could contain other composite data types in it? Should we do it lazily, using copy-on-write as we mutate the inner vectors? The implementation of this can get tricky. If I access (@ b 0), should I get an immutable [1 2], or should I get a mutable &[1 2] which shares the same memory as the original element, so that mutations on the &[1 2] vector are reflected on the &[[1 2] [3 4]] one?
I'm too tired to even analyse the possibilities right now.
Suppose I have a data structure with a bunch of immutable fields, say, (Person name age) and I decide I want to make the age field mutable. In our conceptual framework, this means wrapping the value of the field in a mutable box, e.g., (Person "Hildur" &22), i.e., the field itself remains immutable, but its value is a mutable cell. That looks nice, and makes all mutability readily visible, but it also means that we have to change all code using the age field to extract the value from the box, even code that does not mutate the value.
Maybe this is a good thing: if the code was written under the assumption that the value does not change, maybe it is good that we have to revise everything when we turn it mutable. On the other hand, this makes it harder to try things out in code and run it to see what happens, and for I long time I have defended the ability to run incomplete (and even wrong) programs while prototyping. However, I also want to be able to run optional static checks, and it's easier to do so when code is explicit about its intentions. So there we go.
An alternative to the mutability-as-boxes approach is just to make all composite data structures carry a 'mutable' flag. We can still use the notation &[1 2 3] to mean a vector with the mutable flag on. We can provide an operation like Clojure's persistent! which turns the mutability flag of an object off. An operation to turn it back on would be more dangerous, but might be useful for debugging purposes (though it's the kind of thing you can be certain will be abused if added to the language (though Lisps have traditionally always preferred to empower the user rather than impose decisions on them)).
In this scenario, the semantics of (set! (@ v 0) 42) is to actually modify the vector in-place, so we don't need the double illusion trick. If we want to return an immutable version of a mutable data structure without losing the mutability, we have to explicitly copy it. Perhaps more descriptive of intention, we may have a non-destructive persistent operation which returns an immutable version of a value, which may or may not actually involve a copy (it may actually use copy-on-write behind the scenes). Thread synchronization has to be done explicitly, otherwise you assume the risks of getting a partially-modified copy. This is somewhat unsatisfying, but inconsistencies across threads could happen with boxes anyway whenever you had to work with more than one box, so a better solution to synchronization is needed anyway.
This idea of using mutable boxes + immutable data structures + optimization tricks had been haunting me for a week and seemed really appealing at first, but thinking more deeply about it, it does have its share of problems. Maybe it's a cool idea anyway, maybe not. I have to think more about it. Said research will require more and abundant funding.
[This post started as a toot, but grew slightly larger than 500 characters.]
I just realized something about Scheme.
There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of Scheme implementations out there. It's probably one of the languages with the largest number of implementations. People write Schemes for fun, and/or to learn more about language implementations, or whatever. The thing is, if Scheme did not exist, those people would probably still be writing small Lisps, they would just not be Scheme. The fact that Scheme is so minimal means that the jump from implementing an ad-hoc small Lisp to implementing Scheme is not that much (continuations notwithstanding). So even though Scheme is so minimal that almost everything beyond the basics is different in each implementation, if there were not Scheme, those Lisps would probably still exist and not have even that core in common. From this perspective, Scheme's minimalism is its strength, and possibly one of the reasons it's still relevant today and not some forgotten Lisp dialect from the 1970s. It's also maybe one of the reasons R6RS, which departed from the minimalist philosophy, was so contentious.
Plus, that core is pretty powerful and well-designed. It spares each Lisp implementor from part of the work of designing a new language, by providing a solid basis (lexical scoping, proper closures, hygienic macros, etc.) from which to grow a Lisp. I'm not one hundred percent sold on the idea of first class continuations and multiple values as part of this core*, and I'm not arguing that every new Lisp created should be based on Scheme, but even if you are going to depart from that core, the core itself is a good starting point to depart from.
[* Though much of the async/coroutine stuff that is appearing in modern languages can be implemented on the top of continuations, so maybe their placement in that core is warranted.]
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