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The Idris Programming Language

Implementing Embedded Domain Specific Languages with Dependent Types

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Central European Functional Programming School (CEFP 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8606))

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Abstract

Types describe a program’s meaning. Dependent types, which allow types to be predicated on values, allow a program to be given a more precise type, and thus a more precise meaning. Typechecking amounts to verifying that the implementation of a program matches its intended meaning. In this tutorial, I will describe Idris, a pure functional programming language with dependent types, and show how it may be used to develop verified embedded domain specific languages (EDSLs). Idris has several features intended to support EDSL development, including syntax extensions, overloadable binders and implicit conversions. I will describe how these features, along with dependent types, can be used to capture important functional and extra-functional properties of programs, how resources such as file handles and network protocols may be managed through EDSLs, and finally describe a general framework for programming and reasoning about side-effects, implemented as an embedded DSL.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Typically, and perhaps confusingly, referred to in the dependently typed programming literature as “vectors”.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/idris-lang/Idris-dev/tree/master/examples.

  3. 3.

    http://haskell.org/platform.

  4. 4.

    Named instances are also available, but beyond the scope of this tutorial.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/idris-hackers/idris-vim.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/idris-hackers/idris-emacs.

  7. 7.

    Reading a line may fail, but for the purposes of this example, we consider this harmless and return an empty string.

  8. 8.

    In practice, ’name simply introduces a new empty type.

References

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) for funding this research. I would also like to thank the many contributors to the Idris system and libraries, as well as the reviewers for their helpful and constructive suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9SX, UK

    Edwin Brady

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  1. Edwin Brady
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Correspondence to Edwin Brady .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

    Viktória Zsók

  2. Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

    Zoltán Horváth

  3. Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Lehel Csató

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Brady, E. (2015). The Idris Programming Language. In: Zsók, V., Horváth, Z., Csató, L. (eds) Central European Functional Programming School. CEFP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8606. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15940-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15940-9_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15939-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15940-9

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