Plex

Plex is a simple programming language based on a notion of objects as extensible records. It supports eager evaluation, first-class functions and dynamic types, but tries to check the integrity of programs statically — that is, at compile time.

Plex started as a port of Andrej Bauer's Boa, but the language has since changed in significant ways to include ideas from Ocaml and Haskell. As such, it's syntax and semantics draw heavily from these languages.

The main goal of Plex is to be a learning project. It may become a more serious effort at some point in the future, but for now it is little more than a hobbyist's project.

Work in Progress

Examples

See the test directory for example code that works

Building and running

• Install Elixir

• Clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/rpip/plex.git && cd plex
$ mix escript.build

Run a file

$ ./plex test/examples/hello.px

REPL

Plex includes a simple REPL, which you can play around with:

$ ./plex
Erlang/OTP 18 [erts-7.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [async-threads:10]
Plex (0.0.1)
/h   - Print this help message
/q   - Exit the REPL
/lex - Tokenize code
/pp  - Tokenize and parse code
plex> let x = 3 with fn y -> y + 10
<Val x>
plex> x + 1
4
plex> x 2
12
plex> let x = 10 in (fn -> x + 1)
11
plex> let person = {name=nil, age=0}
<Record person>
plex> let ama = person with {name="Ama", age=20}
<Record person>
plex> ama.name
Ama
plex> let ama = ama with {age=18}
plex> ama.age
18
plex> let greet name = print "Hello #{name}"
<Func greet>
plex> greet "Joe"
Hello Joe

Test Suite

To run the automated test suite:

$ mix test

Documentation

You can build the project source docs locally by running MIX_ENV=docs mix docs.

To learn more about the language specification, see the wiki pages.

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed as:

1. Add plex to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

   def deps do [{:plex, "~> 0.0.1"}] end

2. Ensure plex is started before your application:

   def application do [applications: [:plex]] end