4 ms·

The Scotch programming language - my Christmas break 2010 project

36 points by bendmorris 16y ago

effigies 16y ago
This is kind of neat. It seems like it'd be useful as a more easily debugged Haskell. I'd be more inclined to actually play with it, though, if it accepted a superset of Haskell, which allowed arbitrary IO tainting. So I might write: do pure code {- Scotch debug statements ... -} pure code And then just dump it into the Scotch compiler/interpreter when I ran into issues. Of course, this would only work if you could guarantee semantic equivalence to the Haskell except in those debug bits.
- Miky 16y ago
  "A superset of Haskell, which allowed arbitrary IO tainting" doesn't really make any sense with Haskell's semantics, unless you're talking about unsafePerformIO, which already exists.
- batterseapower 16y ago
  You can "printf debug" Haskell code pretty well using 'trace' (http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/html/Debug-Trace.html#v:trace http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/...) which was designed for the purpose. The lack of gdb support for Haskell is very irritating, but it seems you won't get that with Scotch at the moment either.
- bendmorris 16y ago
  Thanks for the comment. One of my main goals was definitely to make an easier-to-debug and easier-to-throw-things-together-quickly-in functional language. To help accomplish this goal, there are some other significant differences from Haskell, such as dynamic/weak typing and cleaner syntax - I think that some aspects of Haskell's syntax are barriers to adoption and comprehension, so I'm going for a more Python-esque "readable pseudocode" syntax as much as possible. So, there will never quite be equivalence to Haskell. I think your idea would make an interesting project as well, and as a Haskell user I'd definitely use it.
wccrawford 16y ago
Wow. That has some awesome concepts. Keep up the good work!
jbr 16y ago
This looks like a really cool project/language. How do I build it? Does it build on OS X? -- I'd love to "watch" the project on github, but alas it's stranded on the island of google code. Check out this [1] basho blog entry on why they chose github over bitbucket — most of the reasoning applies to google code as well. I'm not affiliated with github, by the way, just a happy user. For a project like this, the concept of "watchers" isn't a vanity metric. I've been working on a lisp->javascript language and have found github watchers to be surprisingly motivating and encouraging. [1] http://blog.basho.com/2010/11/11/a-few-more-details-on-why-we-switched-to-github/ http://blog.basho.com/2010/11/11/a-few-more-details-on-why-w...
- bendmorris 16y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac, so my ability to support Mac users is limited at the moment. Scotch should build from source just fine if you install GHC and use Haskell's Cabal tool to download a few extra packages - haskeline and executable-path are the two I can think of at the moment that are needed. The command to build is ghc --make scotch. Just run the executable that's produced. Let me know if you run into any problems and I'll see if I can help. As far as Github, never used it, as I've always been a SVN guy - I'll have to look into it after the holidays are over. Thanks for the suggestion.
  - yawniek 16y ago
    cool stuff! got it working under os x. deps are: haskeline, executable-path and Decimal
- bendmorris 16y ago
  I took your advice. Scotch officially moved over to Github - https://github.com/bendmorris/scotch https://github.com/bendmorris/scotch
deleted 16y ago
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36 points by bendmorris 16y ago

This is kind of neat. It seems like it'd be useful as a more easily debugged Haskell. I'd be more inclined to actually play with it, though, if it accepted a superset of Haskell, which allowed arbitrary IO tainting. So I might write: do pure code {- Scotch debug statements ... -} pure code And then just dump it into the Scotch compiler/interpreter when I ran into issues. Of course, this would only work if you could guarantee semantic equivalence to the Haskell except in those debug bits.

Miky 16y ago
"A superset of Haskell, which allowed arbitrary IO tainting" doesn't really make any sense with Haskell's semantics, unless you're talking about unsafePerformIO, which already exists.
batterseapower 16y ago
You can "printf debug" Haskell code pretty well using 'trace' (http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/html/Debug-Trace.html#v:trace http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/...) which was designed for the purpose. The lack of gdb support for Haskell is very irritating, but it seems you won't get that with Scotch at the moment either.
bendmorris 16y ago
Thanks for the comment. One of my main goals was definitely to make an easier-to-debug and easier-to-throw-things-together-quickly-in functional language. To help accomplish this goal, there are some other significant differences from Haskell, such as dynamic/weak typing and cleaner syntax - I think that some aspects of Haskell's syntax are barriers to adoption and comprehension, so I'm going for a more Python-esque "readable pseudocode" syntax as much as possible. So, there will never quite be equivalence to Haskell. I think your idea would make an interesting project as well, and as a Haskell user I'd definitely use it.

wccrawford 16y ago

Wow. That has some awesome concepts. Keep up the good work!

jbr 16y ago

This looks like a really cool project/language. How do I build it? Does it build on OS X? -- I'd love to "watch" the project on github, but alas it's stranded on the island of google code. Check out this [1] basho blog entry on why they chose github over bitbucket — most of the reasoning applies to google code as well. I'm not affiliated with github, by the way, just a happy user. For a project like this, the concept of "watchers" isn't a vanity metric. I've been working on a lisp->javascript language and have found github watchers to be surprisingly motivating and encouraging. [1] http://blog.basho.com/2010/11/11/a-few-more-details-on-why-we-switched-to-github/ http://blog.basho.com/2010/11/11/a-few-more-details-on-why-w...

bendmorris 16y ago
Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac, so my ability to support Mac users is limited at the moment. Scotch should build from source just fine if you install GHC and use Haskell's Cabal tool to download a few extra packages - haskeline and executable-path are the two I can think of at the moment that are needed. The command to build is ghc --make scotch. Just run the executable that's produced. Let me know if you run into any problems and I'll see if I can help. As far as Github, never used it, as I've always been a SVN guy - I'll have to look into it after the holidays are over. Thanks for the suggestion.
- yawniek 16y ago
  cool stuff! got it working under os x. deps are: haskeline, executable-path and Decimal
bendmorris 16y ago
I took your advice. Scotch officially moved over to Github - https://github.com/bendmorris/scotch https://github.com/bendmorris/scotch

deleted 16y ago

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