atoms in Wombat

Since I'm too busy/weak to do more important things, I'm going to do some posts on specific aspects of the Wombat design. Hopefully this will be easier to understand than the doc "Outline of the Wombat Programming Language". I'll try to do it in an order that avoids too many forward references.

Lisp has always used atoms a lot, and perhaps gave them a bad name in the early days by adding a mutable value to each to give dynamically scoped mutable variables (yikes!). Wombat separates atoms firmly from variable identifiers by using a different syntax. An atom is an identifier preceded by a dot ("."). So .length is an atom. The only property of atoms is that they are distinguishable, so they can be easily used in conditional constructs like “if” and “case”.

The syntax is carefully chosen (i.e. it’s a hack) because the main use of atoms is to pick out methods. The expression s.length can occur in many languages. However in Wombat the dot is not a syntactic element, it is just a part of .length.

Of course lisp variants use atoms to pick methods as well. This looks like it is creating global names (as some uses of atoms in lisp do), but it isn’t. In any language where we can write s.length, the “length” method clearly has its meaning restricted to the context of s. In effect s is acting as a namespace of names that are relevant to it. This is much nicer than python’s len(s), in which len is a name polluting the global namespace, but without a clear meaning independent of s.

Well I had to laugh. Of course Haskell field selectors avoid the imaginary abuse of global names. But I notice that the next version will have a feature: OverloadedRecordFields. Yes, Haskell has rediscovered atoms.

In Wombat the expression s.length is a function invocation. It just follows the Haskell style in which the function is immediately followed by the parameter, and binds tightly to it. Parentheses are not needed when the parameter is a simple expression such as an identifier or an atom.

But, I hear you say, s is a String (let’s say) not a procedure. Yes, but in Wombat every value can act as a procedure. Every type, such as String, has a method .asProc which defines the behaviour as a procedure. So in this case, s.length means String.asProc(s).length. We gloss over the recursive character of this definition...

Atoms turn out to have other uses, but they are all similar in taking their meaning from a nearby context.