Kick-off

Ok, I said I will "try and create a toy implementation of E-like system", and so I started this blog to document my thinking and its changes.

First of all, I am happy to start working on this, as my previous experience with Haskell was limited to school assignments - now I can finally use all the cool features, including type classes, existential types, composable transactions, and more :-)

I quickly rolled a parser for join calculus using Parsec, not that this was needed at the moment, but it was fun and a good warm-up.

Now I am pondering over the ways to skin... err, to modularize the runtime.
One idea is to have multiple languages interoperating in my vats (word "vat" is used without permission of E authors :-) ), so I want to separate semantics of the process definition language from that of the "robustness framework".

I will start from defining the notions of delivery (or message), object (the target of deliveries), and effect - what happens upon delivery. I need at least IO effects to model output devices (in terms of E thesis), and also (STM [Delivery]) effects to allow objects send messages to other objects (transactionally - in the same vat). I think I will need forall to allow multiple implementations of objects to cooperate... Time to learn some Haskell-fu :-)

BTW, if you wonder: Fluid is the code name of this project.