Philosophy of Tamsin

I suppose that's a rather heavy-handed word to use, "philosophy". But this is the document giving the whys of Tamsin rather than the technical points.

Why did you write Tamin?

Basically, every time I see someone use a compiler-compiler like yacc or a parser combinator library, part of me thinks, "Well why didn't you just write a recursive-descent parser? Recursive-descent parsers are easy to write and they make for extremely pretty code!" And what does a recursive-descent parser do? It consumes input. But don't all algorithms consume input? So why not have a language which makes it easy to write recursive-descent parsers, and force all programs to be written as recursive-descent parsers? Then all code will be pretty! (Yeah, sure, OK.)

Why is it/is it not a...

Meta-Language

(Also known, in their more practical incarnations, as "compiler-compilers" or "parser generators".)

Tamsin is one, because:

• The basic operations all map directly to combinators in BNF (or rather, Wirth's EBNF):
  • & is sequencing
  • | is alternation
  • [] is sugar for alternation with the empty string
  • {} is asteration
  • "foo" is a terminal
  • foo is a non-terminal
• Using only these operations produces a sensible program — one which parses its input by the grammar so given.

Tamsin isn't one, because:

• There is no requirement that any input be processed at all.

Programming Language

Tamsin is one, because:

• Productions can have local variables.

• Productions can call other productions (or themselves, recursively) with arguments, and they return a value:

  reverse(pair(H, T), A) = reverse(T, pair(H, A)).
  reverse(nil, A) = A.
  

• It's Turing-complete.

• It can be, and in fact has been, bootstrapped.

Tamsin isn't one, because:

• The syntax is really geared to consuming input rather than general programming.

Rubbish Lister

What does this even mean? Well, there is that one famous rubbish lister that we can use as an example for now, until I come up with a better definition here.

Tamsin is one, because:

• There's more than one way to say it.
• The same symbol means different things in different contexts (for example, foo might be either the name of a production, or an atomic term.)
• Implicit this, implicit that.
• Optomized (a bit) for problem-solving throwaway one-liners rather than large, engineered systems.
• Anyone up for a game of golf?

Tamsin isn't one, because:

• It's possible to express its syntax in a form that humans can understand.
• In fact, it's possible to express its syntax in Tamsin. In fact, it's possible to bootstrap Tamsin — a Tamsin-to-C compiler has been written in Tamsin. This is very un-rubbish-lister-ish.

Batteries Included

Are batteries included? Or rather, what batteries are included? By strange coincidence, the batteries that are included are almost exactly the ones you'd expect to be useful in bootstrapping a Tamsin-to-C compiler:

• list module — reverse, append, member, etc.
• tamsin_scanner module
• tamsin_parser module
• tamsin_analyzer module