v1.12.0 (Nov 2020)

• FFI:

  • RawOpaqueData.cin now returns a term and takes constants into account. Whenever a value is represented with a named constant, the API grants that:

    • the value is embedded using that constant
    • that constant is read back to the original value

• API:

  • New Compile.extend to (quickly) add clauses to a program
  • New argument ?follows:program to Compile.unit to have the unit be compiled using the very same symbol table (no new symbols can be declared by the unit in this case)

• Library:

  • rename map2_filter -> map2-filter
  • new map-filter

• Build:

  • use md5 (OCaml's digest) instead of sha1 (external utility)

v1.11.4 (Aug 2020)

• do not rely on /bin/bash in Makefile (helps on nix and freebsd)

v1.11.3 (Aug 2020)

• ppxfindcache: use shasum instead of sha1sum
• Parser: print file names in a VScode friendly way
• Fix opam package dependency on camlp5 and ppxlib
• Fix output of -print* options to the elpi command line utility
• New builtin rex_split (like OCaml's Str.split)

v1.11.2 (May 2020)

• Nicer error message when compiling an applied spilling expression
• Fix opam package
• Trace: print locations in VScode friendly way

v1.11.1 (May 2020)

• Fix to the opam file, ppxlib is required to be >= 0.12.0 and ocaml-migrate-parsetree >= 1.6.0. Moreover we disable tests on Alpine linux
• Print locations in such a way that VScode can understand then, and click jump to type errors

v1.11.0 (May 2020)

• Builtin:

  • var now accepts 3 arguments, as constant and name.

• Trace:

  • output facilities: json and tty on both files and network sockets
  • trace messages to link goals to their subgoals
  • spy points categorized into user and dev
  • all trace points were revised and improved
  • port to ppxlib

• Build system:

  • minimal build dependencies are now: camlp5 ocamlfind dune re
  • cache ppx output in .ml format in src/.ppcache that Elpi can be buildt without ppx_deriving.std and elpi.trace.ppx using a new tool in ppxfindcache/
  • vendor a copy of ppx_deriving_runtime (suffix _proxy) to be used when ppx_deriving is not installed
  • generate custom merlinppx.exe for src/ and and patch .merlin file so that one can have decent merlin support
  • make target test-noppx to compile on an alternative opam switch

v1.10.2 (February 2020)

• Builtin:

  • occurs now accepts arguments of different types

• API:

  • expose beta reduction on raw terms

v1.10.1 (February 2020)

• make API.Builtin_checker module public so that third parties can reuse the source

v1.10.0 (February 2020)

• Compiler:

  • large refactoring to separate the table of global (statically initialized) symbols, the table of symbols of a program being compiled and the table of symbols used at runtime.
  • API for separate compilation.

• API:

  • Setup.init now returns a handle to an elpi instance to be passed to many other APIs.
  • New APIs Compile.unit and Compile.assemble for separate compilation.
  • Constants.from_stringc and Constants.mk*S API removed in favor for Constants.declare_global_symbol (to be used in module initialization code).

v1.9.1 (January 2020)

• Tests:

  • Fix testing framework on runners pre 1.9.0.

• Parser:

  • Line numbers after quotations were wrong, since \n inside quotations were not taken into account.

• Typing:

  • Name alias abbreviations are not refolded in error messages. Eg. typeabbrev x int does not take over int, while typeabbrev x (list int) does over list int.
  • Fix type abbreviation refolding, was not working on some cases.

• Stdlib:

  • Fix is function int_of_string to do what it says
  • New is function rhc : string -> int computes the inverse of chr

v1.9.0 (January 2020)

• Typing:

  • typeabbrev declarations are now taken into account and unfolded by the compiler. The type checker refolds abbreviations when printing error messages with the following caveat: when two type abbreviations can be refolded the last declared one wins.

• Compiler:

  • @macro are no more accepted in types, since typeabbrev provides the same functionality.
  • fix clash between builtin names and type names
  • accumulate is idempotent: accumulating the same file a second time has no effect.

• FFI:

  • built in predicate are allowed to not assign (not produce a value) for output and input-output arguments.
  • input-output arguments are forced to be Conversion.t of type 'a ioarg, and recommended to wrap any nested type not able to represent variables in ioarg. Eg int option should be int ioarg option ioarg. In this way one can safely call these builtins with non-ground terms, such as some _, for example to assert the result is not none but without providing a ground term such as some 3.
  • MLData declarations for OpaqueData are no more named using a macro but rather using a type abbreviation. This can break user code. The fix is to substitute @myopaquetype with myopaquetype everywhere.

• Stdlib:

  • diagnostic data type to be used as an ioarg for builtins that can fail with a relevant error message. On the ML side one can used Elpi.Builtin.mkOK and Elpi.Builtin.mkERROR "msg" to build its values.
  • std.assert-ok!, std.forall-ok, std.do-ok!, std.lift-ok and std.while-ok-do! commodity predicates.
  • All operators for calc (infix _ is _) now come with a type declaration.

v1.8.0 (October 2019)

• Bugfix:

  • shorten foo.{ bar }. when foo.bar is a builtin used to be miscompiled.
  • elpi-typechecker.elpi now correclty stops printing warnings after it printed 10 (used to stop after he processed 10, that may not be the same thing, since some warnings are suppressed).

• Parser:

  • Interpret -2 (with no space) as the negative 2 not as the constant -2. This way X is 3 - 2 and Y is 3 + -2 are both valid.

• FFI:

  • OpaqueData now requires a ternary comparison, not just equality.

• Stdlib:

  • new data type cmp for ternary comparison.
  • std.set and std.map now based on ternary comparison.

• Builtin:

  • cmp_term giving an order on ground terms.
  • ground_term to check if a term is ground.

v1.7.0 (September 2019)

• Parser:

  • Tolerate trailing , in lists, eg [1,2,3,] is now parsed as [1,2,3].
  • Error if the input of Parse.goal_from_string contains extra tokens
  • Binary conjunction & is now turned on the fly into the nary one ,.

• Bugfix:

  • Nasty bug in pruning during higher order unification, see #36.
  • Discard is now considered a stack term, and is turned into an unification variable on heapification.
  • API.RawData.look now expands UVar correctly

• Stdlib:

  • set and map for arbitrary terms equipped with an order relation. Based on the code of OCaml's Map and Set library.
  • New API map.remove for maps on builtin data.

• FFI:

  • New ContextualConversion module and ctx_readback type. In an FFI call one can specify a readback for the hypothetical context that is run once and its output is give to the ML code instead of the "raw" constraints and hyp list.

• API:

  • Commodity functions in Elpi.Builtin to export as built-in OCaml's Set.S and Map.S interfaces (the output of Set.Make and Map.Make). All data is limited to be a closed term.
  • Constants.andc2 was removed
  • FlexibleData.Elpi.make takes no ~lvl argument (it is always 0)
  • RawData.view no more contains Discard since it is not an heap term

• Misc:

  • Pretty printer for unification variable made re-entrant w.r.t. calls to the CHR engine (used to lose the mapping between heap cells and names)
  • Pretty printer for solution abstracted over a context (part of the solution). In this way the result can be printed correctly even if the runtime has been destroyed.
  • Default paths for finding .elpi files fixed after the switch to dune
  • A few more tests regarding unification, data structures and performance

v1.6.0 (July 2019)

• Builtin:

  • same_term (infix ==) for Prolog's non-logical comparison (without instantiation).
  • set and map A (A only allowed to be a closed term) on string, int and loc keys.

• Compiler:

  • provide line number on error about duplicate mode declaration
  • elpi-checker is faster and bails out after 10 seconds

• FFI:

  • allow AlgebraicData declarations to mix M and MS constructors
  • Conversion.t for closed terms (no unification variable and no variables bound by the program)

• Tests:

  • typecheck all tests and measure type checking time

v1.5.2 (July 2019)

• Test suite: ship elpi-quoted_syntax.elpi

v1.5.1 (July 2019)

• Test suite: print the log of the first failure to ease debugging on third party CI.

v1.5.0 (July 2019)

Elpi 1.5 requires OCaml 4.04 or newer

• REPL:

  • type errors are considered fatal, pass -no-tc to skip type checking.
  • use dune subst in order to implement -version flag to the command line utility.

• Runtime:

  • reset unification variables names map at each execution. This makes the names of variable printed in a reproducible way across executions.

• FFI:

  • readback is now as powerful as embed and can generate extra goals. The two types are now dual.

v1.4 (June 2019)

Elpi 1.4 requires OCaml 4.04 or newer

• Sources and build: Switch to dune, with a little make base wrapper. As a result of dune wrapping the library all sources are renamed from elpi_x.ml to x.ml, and each module Elpi_X is now available as Elpi.X. In particular clients must now use Elpi.API and Elpi.Builtin.

• FFI:

  • Conversion.TypeErr now carries the depth at which the error is found, so that the term payload can be correctly printed.
  • Built in predicates are allowed to raise TypeErr in their body
  • BuiltInPredicate.Full now returns a list of extra_goals, exactly as Conversion.embed does making conversion code easy to call in the body of a predicate.

v1.3 (June 2019)

Elpi 1.3 requires OCaml 4.04 or newer

• API: Major reorganization: The Extend module has gone; the module structure is flat and ordered by complexity. Most modules are named after the kind of data they let one represent. Eg AlgebraicData, OpaqueData, FlexibleData or for low level access RawOpaqueData or RawData for naked terms.

• FFI:

  • RawData.mkAppL and RawData.mkAppSL handy constructors
  • custom_state renamed state
  • No more solution in the type of builtin predicates but rather constraints and state explicitly
  • Only one type of extensible state to that the same code can be used to generate the query at compile time and convert data at run time
  • Unify MLCData and MLADT into MLData

  • AlgebraicData.t supports C for containers, so that one can model

    type t = A | B of list t

    as

          K("a", N, ..
    K("b",(C ((fun x -> list x),N)), ..

  • new FlexibleTerm.Elpi.t and FlexibleTerm.Map to represent Elpi's unification variables and keep a bijective map between them and any host application data.
  • RawData.term contains no more UVar, AppUVar, Arg and AppArg but only UnifVar of FlexibleTerm.Elpi.t * term list.
  • Simple GADT for describing a query. When a query is built that way, the solution contains an output field holding data of the type described by the query.

• Library:

  • replace mode (std.mem i i) with (std.mem i o): member can be assigned
  • separate std.mem! and std.mem

v1.2 (April 2019)

Fix:

• equality up-to eta on rigid terms (used to work only on flexible terms)
• expand_* in charge of putting unification variables in canonical form was sometimes omitting some lambdas in one of its outputs

Language:

• shorten directive to give short names to symbols that live in namespaces, e.g. shorten std.{ rev } lets one write rev instead of std.rev
• spilling understands implication and conjunction, e.g. g { h => (a, f) } becomes (h => (a, f X)), g X
• syntax of .. as X to bind subterms in the head of a clause changed precedence. In particular lam x\ B as X binds lam x\ B to X (instead of just B, as it was the case in previous versions)
• :index(...) attribute for predicates to select which argument(s) should be indexed and at which depth. Multi-argument indexing and deep-indexing are based on unification hashes, see ELPI.md for more details

Library:

• predefined types:

  • bool with tt and ff
  • option A with none and some A
  • pair A B with pr A B, fst and snd

• predefined control structure:

  • if C T E

• standard library (taken from coq-elpi) in the std namespace.

  Conventions:

  • all errors are signalled using one of the following two symbols that can be overridden by grafting clauses to hide them, namely fatal-error and fatal-error-w-data
  • the ! suffix is for (variants) of predicates that generate only the first solution
  • all predicates have mode declarations that follow their functional interpretation; variants keeping the relational interpretation are named using the R suffix

  Symbols: debug-print, ignore-failure!, assert!, spy, spy!, unsafe-cast, length, rev, last, append, appendR, take, drop, drop-last, split-at, fold, fold2, map, map-i, map2, map2_filter, nth, lookup, lookup!, mem, exists, exists2, forall, forall2, filter, zip, unzip, flatten, null, iota, flip, time, do!, spy-do!, any->string, random.init, random.self_init, random.int

  While the predicates in the library are reasonably tested, their names and name spaces may change in the future, e.g. a specific name space for list related code may be created (as well for strings, debug, etc).

Builtin:

• name is now typed as any -> variadic any prop to support the following two use cases:

  • name T succeeds if T is an eigenvariable (even if it is applied)
  • name T HD ARGS relates T (an applied eigenvariable) to its head and arguments (as a list): pi f x y\ name (f x y) f [x,y]
• new builtin constant working as name but for non-eigenvariables
• halt now accepts any term, not just strings
• getenv is now typed as string -> option string and never fails. The old semantics can be obtained by just writing getenv Name (some Value)

API:

• new data type of locations in the source file: Ast.Loc.t
• exception ParseError(loc, message) systematically used in the parsing API (no more leak of exceptions or data types from the internal parsing engine, i.e. no more NotInProlog or Stream.Error exceptions)
• type of quotations handlers changed: they now receive in input the location of the quoted text in order to be able to locate their own parsing errors

• simplified term constructors:

  • mkConst split into mkGlobal and mkBound
  • variants with trailing S taking a string rather than a global constant, e.g. mkAppS, mkGlobalS, mkBuiltinS
  • mkBuiltinName removed (replace by mkBuiltinS)
  • constant spillc exported: one can not build a term such as f {g a} by writing mkAppS "f" (mkApp spillc (mkAppS "g" (mkGlobalS "a") []) []

• FFI:

  • to_term and of_term renamed to embed and readback and made stateful. They can access the state, the hypothetical context and the constraint store (exactly as Full ffi builtins do) and can return an updated state. Moreover embed can generate new goals (eg declaration of constraints) so that data that requires companion constraints fits the capabilities of the FFI (no need to simulate that by using a Full predicate with arguments of type any, as coq-elpi was doing)

  • Arguments to builtin predicates now distinguish between

    • In ML code must receive the data, type error is the data cannot be represented in ML
    • Out ML code received Keep or Discard so that it can avoid generating data the caller is not binding back
    • InOut ML code receives Data of 'a or NoData. The latter case is when the caller passed _, while the former contains the actual data
  • In the declaration of a data type for the FFI, the ty field is no more a string but an AST, so that containers (eg val list : 'a data -> 'a list data) can more easily generate the composite type
  • New GADT to describe simple ADTs (with no binders)

Compiler:

• handling of locations for quotations
• better error reporting: many errors now come with a location

REPL:

• more structure in the output of --help including hints for the tracing options
• new option -print-passes to debug the compiler

Test Suite:

• rewritten using more OCaml & Dune and less bash & make. Requires dune, cmdliner and ANSITerminal in order to build

v1.1.1 (October 2018)

Fix:

• beta was not calling deref_* in all cases, possibly terminating reduction too early (and raising an anomaly)

v1.1 (September 2018)

Language:

• CHR semantics conformed to the "revised operational semantics", that is roughly the following:

  • 1 for each active constraint (just declared via declare_constraint)

    • 2 for each rule

      • 3 for each position j of the active constraint (from 0 to n)

        • 4 for each permutation of constraints having the active at j

          • 5 try apply the rule

            • 6 remove constraints to be removed from the current set of permutations and the set of active or passive constraints

  In Elpi 1.0 loops 3 and 2 were swapped (by mistake)

• CHR keys refined. In declare_constraints C KEYS:

  • KEYS must be a list of variables (no more special case KEYS = Var)
  • KEYS = [_,...] labels the constraint with the unique variable _. In other words _ is a master key one can use to label constraints that share no other variable and that have to be combined together. The master key will never be assigned, hence it does not count for resumption
  • KEYS = [] is accepted with the following meaning: constraints with no key are never resumed automatically and are never combined with other constraints

Builtin:

• halt is now typed as variadic string prop and the strings passed are printed when the interpreter halts

Aesthetic:

• bound variables are now printed as c0, c1, ... instead of x0, x1, ... to avoid ambiguity with X0, X1, ... on small/far-away screens

API changes:

• rename:

  • custom_constraints -> state (record field)
  • syntactic_constraints -> constraints (type)
  • CustomConstraint -> CustomState (module)

• add:

  • StrMap and StrSet: expose pp and show

• alias:

  • Data.Extend.solution ~ Data.solution (cast: Data.Extend.of_solution)

Compilation:

• require re >= 1.7.2 (the version introducing Re_str -> Re.str)

Misc:

• improved some error messages, minor fixes to elpi-checker

v1.0 (April 2018)

Second public release, developed in tandem with coq-elpi and matita-elpi.

The programming language features syntactic constraints (suspended goals) and a meta language (inspired by CHR) to manipulate the constrain store.

There is an API for clients letting one drive the interpreter and extend the set of built-in predicates, register quotations and anti-quotations, etc.

The software is now built using findlib into a library. The standalone interpreter is just a regular client of the API.

LPAR 2015 (Jul 12, 2015)

First public release accompanying the paper ELPI: fast, Embeddable, λProlog Interpreter