Lambda the Ultimate

Everything old is new again: Quoted Domain Specific Languages, by Shayan Najd, Sam Lindley, Josef Svenningsson, Philip Wadler:

We describe a new approach to domain specific languages (DSLs), called Quoted DSLs (QDSLs), that resurrects two old ideas: quotation,
from McCarthy’s Lisp of 1960, and the subformula property, from Gentzen’s natural deduction of 1935. Quoted terms allow the DSL to share the syntax and type system of the host language. Normalising quoted terms ensures the subformula property, which guarantees that one can use higher-order types in the source while guaranteeing first-order types in the target, and enables using types to guide fusion. We test our ideas by re-implementing Feldspar, which was originally implemented as an Embedded DSL (EDSL), as a QDSL; and we compare the QDSL and EDSL variants.

Neat paper first posted here by Blaisorblade that formalizes the properties needed for using quotation to implement DSLs. Most embedded DSLs use custom operators and lifted conditionals to make embedded programs seem more natural, but quoting enables the use of native operators and conditions, and might lead to more natural expressions of lightweight (possibly heterogenous) staged computations.