[erlang-questions] Core Erlang apply target expression behaviour

[Karl Nilsson]

That is pretty much the approach I am taking. I use the
FSharp.Compiler.Service to do all the checking and get access to the typed
AST, then I transform that to a core erlang AST which I then "pretty"
(ugly) print to a core erlang file, all in fsharp.

On Sun, 23 Apr 2017 at 01:07 Robert Virding <rvirding@REDACTED> wrote:

> I have been thinking about f# as well, but from a different direction. I
> would want to use as much as possible of the existing f# compiler which is
> written in f# so I would write an interpreter in Erlang for AST generated
> by f# parser which you could then use that to run all the early parts of
> the compiler, like type-checking and such. Then hopefully you could replace
> the backend with a new bit which generates core erlang and use the erlang
> compiler for the rest.
>
> I fully realise it would not be as simple as it sounds :-) but I think it
> would be a doable of reusing as much as possible of what is written in f#.
> For me time is the limiting factor.
>
> Robert
>
>
> On 22 April 2017 at 21:52, Karl Nilsson <kjnilsson@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the advice. A few things to think about there.
>> I have been writing things in erlang, compiling and comparing but rather
>> than writing a language from scratch I am working from the AST (or rather
>> the TAST) from another language, fsharp. As fsharp is an ML and core erlang
>> is ML-ish I was hoping to avoid having to do too much mangling but
>> flattening out applies and mod calls with let expressions is easy enough so
>> I'll definitely do that.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Karl
>>
>> On Sat, 22 Apr 2017 at 20:19 Robert Virding <rvirding@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>>> I would try doing 2 things:
>>>
>>> - Write the equivalent Erlang code which does what you want the code to
>>> do, compile it with the to_core0 option and see what it generates. This
>>> then becomes your target code. This is how I did it with LFE.
>>>
>>> - Or you can try flattening out your code to remove the nested calls.
>>> While Core erlang in principle should be able to manage nested code the
>>> Erlang compiler generally flattens things.
>>>
>>> What I found when doing LFE was that while the language *in principle*
>>> allows a lot of things *in practice* later passes in the compiler, for
>>> example the optimisation passes, assume that the code looks like what the
>>> Erlang compiler compiler generates. One example of this is how literal
>>> structures are represented.
>>>
>>> to_core0 returns the Core erlang which has been generated by the
>>> erlang->core conversion pass which is then what is passed on to
>>> optimisation and and code generation. This is what you should be targeting.
>>>
>>> To check what the actual Core erlang data structures look like, not the
>>> pretty printed code, in the shell try doing:
>>>
>>> > c("foo", [binary,to_core0,return]).
>>>
>>> This call will *return* the actual data structure so you can put it in
>>> variable then pretty print it to a file so you can what you really need to
>>> get. Note that some of the attributes are important in later passes.
>>>
>>> What language are you working on?
>>>
>>> Robert
>>>
>>>
>>> On 21 April 2017 at 19:12, Karl Nilsson <kjnilsson@REDACTED> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Whilst trying to compile some code to core erlang I came across a
>>>> problem when the target expression (e0 in spec) to apply was another apply
>>>> expression. According to the spec I thought that would be ok however when
>>>> compiling the .core file with erlc I got an "no_file: Warning: invalid
>>>> function call" error.
>>>>
>>>> What I then tried, not thinking it would work, was to wrap the inner
>>>> apply expression in a let expression. This to my surprise worked just fine.
>>>> I've included the code below. 'addSix` is the working function and
>>>> `addSix2` is the dodgy one. Am I doing something wrong in `addSix2` to in
>>>> terms of how I print my AST or is it simply that `addSix2` cannot be made
>>>> to work? I also tried putting some parens around it but that also didn't
>>>> work.
>>>>
>>>> 'add'/2 =
>>>>     fun (_a0,_b0) ->
>>>>         call 'erlang':'+'(_a0,_b0)
>>>>
>>>> 'addFive'/0 =
>>>>     fun () ->
>>>>         let <_a0> = 5
>>>>         in fun (_b0) ->
>>>>     apply 'add'/2 (_a0,_b0)
>>>>
>>>> 'addSix'/1 =
>>>>     fun (_x0) ->
>>>>         call 'erlang':'+'(let <_fez0> = apply 'addFive'/0 ()
>>>> in apply _fez0 (_x0),1)
>>>>
>>>> 'addSix2'/1 =
>>>>     fun (_x0) ->
>>>>         call 'erlang':'+'(apply     apply 'addFive'/0 () (_x0),1)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Cheers
>>>> Karl
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> erlang-questions mailing list
>>>> erlang-questions@REDACTED
>>>> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>
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