Idris, A General-Purpose Dependently Typed Programming Language: Design and Implementation
Journal of Functional Programming, 23 (05):
552--593 (Oct 18, 2013)DOI: 10.1017/s095679681300018x
Abstract
Many components of a dependently typed programming language are by now well understood, for example, the underlying type theory, type checking, unification and evaluation. How to combine these components into a realistic and usable high-level language is, however, folklore, discovered anew by successive language implementors. In this paper, I describe the implementation of Idris, a new dependently typed functional programming language. Idris is intended to be a general-purpose programming language and as such provides high-level concepts such as implicit syntax, type classes and do notation. I describe the high-level language and the underlying type theory, and present a tactic-based method for elaborating concrete high-level syntax with implicit arguments and type classes into a fully explicit type theory. Furthermore, I show how this method facilitates the implementation of new high-level language constructs.
