Elalang

I came across Elalang on LtU, which apart from meaning Hi language in Greek, has a lot more in common with my language than I thought. The language is a strict, sometimes lazy, dynamic variant of ML or Haskell. It runs on .Net by compiling to bytecode for the CLI.

The funny thing is that I designed the Hi language to be executable even if you erase all types. Apart from that that gave me the time to experiment with the typechecker while bootstrapping the language, it also means that when you would compare the informal cores of both languages, Ela Core would implement an extended form of the Hi language. Basically, untyped lambda calculus evaluated strictly with some Haskell class like mechanism for dynamic dispatch, where Ela Core would be more expressive since it allows to dispatch on the return type of functions. A good thing for generality, but something I didn't design into Hi since I wanted a simple mechanism to dispatch on the type of values; basically following OO in order to make it possible to bind to C++ libraries without too much problems. Hi has OO like interfaces, not Haskell, or Ela, like type classes.

(The meaning of the above: I could simply translate Hi to Ela with some syntactic transformation on the source code; i.e., almost by copy pasting Hi source code. The OO like interfaces also imply I can typecheck with an adaption of F<:. So I guess I should stop mucking about and just implement a version of that; mind you, not even that is trivial.)

I am not sure about robustness or performance of Ela. I read it emits bytecode for a stack machine, which shouldn't be possible, higher order programming implies you'ld normally want some kind of heap.

(What I forgot to say. I like Ela. The fact that it is a dynamic variant of Haskell is really, really nice. You can do tons of tricks you can't do in a strongly typed language, and the runtime performance penalty can't even be that big, in theory, since it's all tagged graph manipulation abstractly anyway.)