Lambda the Ultimate

Another Egel release. New in this patch: do syntax for applications, some utf bugs squashed.

Egel is a small functional scripting language. What sets it apart is that at any time during execution the program, or any program fragment, forms a directed acyclic graph. That makes concurrency, serialization, and shipping of values more trivial than in most other languages and I want to exploit that once to make mobile code a breeze to implement. Shoot any combinator anywhere!

Meanwhile, the egel language supports only the bare minimum as a front-end to a graph rewriting semantics. At the same time, sometimes I implement little syntactic sugar to make programming more pleasant.

The latest addition is do-syntax. Like in many functional languages, you can set up application chains. For example, 0 |> ((+) 1) |> ((*) 2) will reduce to 2.

I found a slight need to facilitate this kind of programming with do, a do expression abbreviates a chain, for example, def f = do ((+) 1) |> ((*) 2) is sugar for def f = [ X -> 2 * (X + 1) ]. I have found this very convenient while programming solutions to last year's Advent of Code.

Of course, this isn't Haskell's monadic do syntax, but as we all know, applicatives are as good as monads. Or are they?