Caml-list,<div><br></div><div>I have to write an interpreter for a datatype rich purely applicative language. I have already written a naive interpreter (like in programming languages class) and was wondering what where the options for writing something that would perform better while keeping it maintainable by a single person &lt; 5% dedicated and preferably only in core-ML (no C code or fancy ML extensions).</div>
<div><br></div><div>The language could be described as a rich datastructure typed SQL with a programming language syntax</div><div>- first class sets, arrays, dictionaries, lists and their corresponding comprehensions</div>
<div>- tuples and records merged into a single concept (accessible per position like in (x, y) = ... or per label like in for t in tupleSet if t.label == 3 then)</div><div>- only applicative functions (no lambda operator, no partial application)</div>
<div>- simple types are int, double and string</div><div>- only user declared types are tuples-records</div><div><br></div><div>It is mainly used for data transformation : take a list of countries, extract from an database the international airports of those countries, geolocalize them using city/location table, generate a distance table using a great-circle distance, assign to each size of plane the legs they can do based on their maximum fight range, etc.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The language has a JavaScript inline capability</div><div><br></div><div>    execute JavaScript { </div><div>        //write your javascript code here </div><div>    }</div><div><br></div><div>that&#39;s typically used to define functions, unroll comprehensions to make them more efficient and to call external libraries (JavaScript has full visibility on all the language objects and can read/write directly inside, probably the existing interpreter was written in JavaScript), so I am considering allowing those features in the core language and only supporting a very slow JavaScript deprecated compatibility mode.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>         Diego Olivier</div>