[Haskell-cafe] Writing an extensible interpreter

Ralf Lammel Ralf.Lammel at microsoft.com
Sun May 21 20:20:17 EDT 2006


Hi David,

Readers on this list will not be surprised to hear me saying that, of
course, type classes perfectly make sense for your scenario. You may
have a look at some posts on "extensible interpreters":

- http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/04-12-111
- http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2005-February/015346.html

There are at least two ways of making the type "[Step] -> String" work
with a setup that replaces Step by a type class. One is: use an
existential type; another is: use HLists. (There is a third one: use
Typeable.)

I'll send you some draft material in a separate email that I don't want
to share publicly yet. In this draft, your scenario is actually
illustrated in a broader context.

And then I should mention that you may also want to have a look at
Hinze's and Loeh's open data types. I seem to remember that they provide
actual tool support (sort of preprocessing) so that this works with
Haskell today.

HTH
Ralf

> -----Original Message-----
> From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-
> bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of David House
> Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2006 5:50 AM
> To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
> Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Writing an extensible interpreter
> 
> Hi all.
> 
> I'm in the process of writing an interpreter for the self-modifying
> automaton languages SMATINY [1], designed by ihope (whose name some of
> you may recognise from IRC). The current effort is online [2], but
> it's at a rather early stage and there's a few modifications I'd like
> to make to it.
> 
> To begin with, extensibility is key. Such tiny languages are designed
> to be easily extendable, and I'd like my interpreter to follow suit.
> At the moment, adding a new command is as follows:
> 
> 1) Add a new constructor for the Step type to represent your command.
> 2) Write a Parsec parser for your command in Smatiny.hs.
> 3) Add said parser to the 'inputs' list in Smatiny.hs.
> 4) Write a 'handler' for your command; a function in State that will
> take the appropriate action.
> 
> This is a bit of an ordeal; I'd like new commands to be addable
> without touching Smatiny.hs, which will form the base of the
> interpreter.
> 
> One solution I was thinking about was to write a new module for each
> command that exports a "parser" and "handler" function. A bit of
> metacode would read the Commands directory then import qualified all
> the modules it finds in there. Subsequently, it would call
> parseSmatiny (the parser; in Smatiny.hs) with all the parsers it found
> as an argument, then send the output of this into runSmatiny (the
> interpreter; also in Smatiny.hs).
> 
> However, the remaining issue is step 1): how would the metacode handle
> additional constructors to the Step ADT? Type classes won't work here:
> the intepreter has a type of [Step] -> String. With type classes this
> would have a type of something like Step a => [a] -> String, but by
> the homogeneity of lists you'd only be able to have one type of step
> in your program.
> 
> Thanks in advance for your input. Let me know if I didn't explain
> something too well; I have a tendancy toward brevity :)
> 
> [1]: http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/SMATINY
> [2]:
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/files/smatiny/impl/smatiny.tar.gz
> 
> --
> -David House, dmhouse at gmail.com
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