Polyadic Funtions in Qi

People have written in to me asking 'Can you define polyadic functions in Qi and give them types?'. The answer is 'yes you can'.

This example shows a really simple type secure HTML formatter which you can extend. It uses a 1-line polyadic function defined in CL. The basic command is

(DEFUN html (Tag &REST Text) (FORMAT NIL "<~A> ~{ ~A~} </~A>" Tag Text Tag))

Thus

(html html
(html head
(html title "Test"))
(html body
(html p "Just some text")))

generates basic HTML

"<html> <head> <title> Test </title> </head> <body> <p> Just some text </p> </body> </html>"

The type theory is more complex. html is a polyadic function that can assume n arguments where n > 1. In such a case we need to define a special type theory for html. Here it is

(datatype html

Tag : symbol; String : string;
_______________________________
(html Tag String) : string;

if (cons? HTML)
if (= (head HTML) html)
if (> (length HTML) 3)
let String (nth 3 HTML)
let NewHTML [(nth 1 HTML) (nth 2 HTML) | (tail (tail (tail HTML)))]
String : string; NewHTML : string;
_________________________________
HTML : string;)

The first (base) case is where n = 2 - it says that html accepts a symbol and a string and outputs a string.

The second case deals with n > 2 - it says that html returns a string just when the second argument is a string and the expression that results from removing this argument also returns a string. This recursively shortens the expression towards the base case.

Since html is a polyadic function and has no type of and by itself, we do not support currying for it. This means in Qi-speak it is a *special form* - one that does not support currying. We need to tell Qi not to try to curry this form of expression and to treat it as special. This does the trick.

(specialise html)

So if I put all this in a file "html.txt"

(DEFUN html (Tag &REST Text) (FORMAT NIL "<~A> ~{ ~A~} </~A>" Tag Text Tag))

(specialise html)

(datatype html

Tag : symbol; String : string;
_______________________________
(html Tag String) : string;

if (cons? HTML)
if (= (head HTML) html)
if (> (length HTML) 3)
let String (nth 3 HTML)
let NewHTML [(nth 1 HTML) (nth 2 HTML) | (tail (tail (tail HTML)))]
String : string; NewHTML : string;
_________________________________
HTML : string;)

I can enter (load "html.txt") in Qi and load the lot.* I can now use it in a type secure Qi environment.

(24+) (html html (html head (html title "Test"))
(html body (html p "Just some text")))
"<html> <head> <title> Test </title> </head> <body> <p> Just some text </p> </body> </html>" : string

Once you've got this far you can do other things - like creating your own type secure formatting shorthand in the style of CL-WHO

(define :head
{string --> string}
Text -> (html head Text))

(define :title
{string --> string}
Title -> (html title Title))

(define :p
{string --> string}
Para -> (html p Para))

(html html (html head (html title "Test")) (html body (html p "Just some text")))

becomes

(html html (:head (:title "Test")) (html body (:p "Just some text")))

If you want to go further and really make it tight you can replace

Tag : symbol; ....

in my datatype by

Tag : tag; ....

and define the type tag to ensure that users cannot generate garbage HTML with nonsense tags. But you've probably got the idea by now and I'll leave the rest to you.

* Note generally it is smart to put Qi and Lisp in seperate files and use the Qi 'load' to load Qi and the CL 'LOAD' to load the CL because the readers are slightly different. Here we can get away with mixing. It is important to declare html to be a special form before we declare the datatype otherwise Qi will use currying in the datatype definition.

Mark