Idris, a language that will change the way you think about programming (2015) (opens in new tab)

The "Vector m a" means that it's a vector (like a Python list) that can only be m elements long, and those elements can only be of type a. E.g. "Vector 3 Int" will always be a Vector with three integers in it. If you try to treat it like a vector of any other length it will refuse to compile (e.g. pass it to a function that requires that it have 4 or more elements).

The whole line is the type declaration for a function (app) that takes a Vector of length m, and a Vector of length n, and produces a Vector of length (m+n). Which is to say, the compiler knows at compile time what length the resulting Vector will be, and will fail to compile if the function you've written doesn't - provably - always meet that requirement.

From a Haskeller's perspective it's amazing because container types are famous loopholes for code that produces runtime errors. For instance, if you call the "head" function (returns the first element) on an empty list it will halt the program at run time with an error, despite the fact that it passed the type check (because an empty list and a full one have the same type).

As someone who learned Haskell and subsequently have been writing a lot of Python, I keep a mental tally of how many of my bugs (some of which took ages to track down) would have been caught immediately by a type system like Haskell or Idris'. I'd say it's well over half.

In Haskell those kind of errors are drastically reduced, but a few still slip through. Languages like Idris can catch even more of them, in a clever way, which is awesome.

You have two parameters - a vector of size "m", and a vector of size "n". The function signature then expects to get back a vector of size "m + n".

Contrast that with a language with method signatures that can only return types like "Vector" or "List", without any information that is dependent on the incoming parameters.

So then, the logic is checked - if the method returns a vector that is anything other than the size of the two incoming parameter vector sizes added together, it won't compile.

In other words, even more behavior that would normally be a runtime bug is checked at compile time, which is a good thing if you are working in a domain where correctness is important and want to avoid runtime bugs.

One thing that no one touched on:

In reading Haskell (and apparently Idris) types, a name that starts with a lower case letter is an unbound type variable - sort of like a template parameter in C++. The `a` in each of the Vect's must be the same type but it can be any type (picked at the call site, for any given call).

Basically the length of the vector is encoded at the type level. Lets you do all sorts of cool stuff.

You can have number systems modulo n, which are only compatible with other numbers modulo the same n because they are distinct types.

It's just another level of abstraction that pretty much nothing else has.

    app : Vect n a -> Vect m a -> Vect (n + m) a

is a type signature for a function, `app`, which should append a vector (`Vect`) of length `n` to a vector of length `m`.

What's cool about Idris and other dependently-typed languages is that the length of the resulting vector, `n + m`, can be tracked in the type. This can prevent a whole slew of errors.

I'm not an expert in Idris, but I will try to answer this as best as I can.

That's the Haskell type notation (Idris and Haskell are similar). Here's an example:

  plus5 :: Int -> Int
  plus5 n = n + 5

The first line is the type declaration of the `plus5` function. You can read it as "plus5 takes an Int as argument and returns another Int". The second line is the function declaration. The equivalent in Python would be:

  def plus5(n):
      return n + 5

The syntax is the same when functions have more arguments:

  add :: Int -> Int -> Int
  add a b = a + b

This means that add takes two integers as arguments and returns another integer. This syntax might look strange (you could be asking yourself "How do I distinguish between the argument and return types?") but that's because in Haskell functions are curried[1].

Haskell (and Idris as well) also has parametric polymorphism, so you can define functions which operate on generic types. For example, the identity function:

  id :: a -> a
  id x = x

You can read this as "`id` is a function that takes an argument of type a and returns another argument of type a (so the return type and argument type must be the same)". This means the id function will work for any type of argument (String, Float, Int, etc.). Note that of course this is not dynamic typing, Haskell and Idris are statically typed and therefore all the types are checked at compile-time.

Now, let's move on to Idris. One of the reasons there's a lot of excitement over Idris is because it has dependent types, i.e., you can declare types that depend on values and these are checked at compile-time.

The example GP gave was this:

  app : Vect n a -> Vect m a -> Vect (n + m) a

`app` here stands for append. This is the function that appends two vectors (lists of static length) together. In Idris, `Vect x y` is a vector of size x and type y, so

   Vect 5 Int

is a vector of 5 integers. So, essentially, `app` is a function that takes two vectors as arguments, `Vect n a` and `Vect m a` (this means they can be of different sizes but their content must be of the same type). It returns a `Vect (n + m) a`.

Think about it for a minute. That is amazing! We can be sure that, at compile-time, just by looking at the function signature, our append function, given two vectors of size n and m, will _always_ return a vector of size (n + m).

If we accidentally implement a function that does adhere to the type specification (for example, it appends the first argument to itself, returning a Vect of size (n + n) instead of (n + m)), the code will not compile and the compiler will tell us where is the bug.

[1]: http://learnyouahaskell.com/higher-order-functions#curried-f...

A length n vector of a's, appended to by a length m vector of a's, results in a length (n + m) vector of a's. This is a safety guarantee that is statically checked at compile time rather than dynamically checked at run time.

You're gonna have to read the article to find out.

Because with dependent typing, the length can be specified at runtime and you still get static checking.

There's also a huge difference between untyped templates and strongly typed generics, but in this particular case the difference is somewhat subtle.

I haven't coded in C++ for a very long time, but won't any implementation of that function, and additional templated functions which call it, only get checked at template expansion time? As I understand, buggy templated functions and classes can go unnoticed in a codebase or library simply because no-one has instantiated them in a way which exposes the bug. This is definitely not the case for Idris.

My understanding was that concepts began as an attempt to fix this "problem".

My recollection of C++ (possibly outdated since 11 or 14, though that would - pleasantly - surprise me) is that template parameters must be picked at compile time. With Idris, you can pick X and Y at runtime and still get compile time checking.

operationally, i'm not sure if there is. it's certainly a lot prettier, though. i'd be curious if there's a deeper difference, too. it feels like there is, at least to me...

You can choose how rigorous you want your proof to be.

I'd highly recommend reading Chapter 1, Section 1.3 from Type-Driven Development. The first chapter is free.

https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development-with-i...

Per my understanding, what's so exciting about this is precisely that you're wrong - it does not need to be known at compile time, but can prove symbolically that the resulting length will be X + Y. And of course, given that, it's not statically creating a distinct instantiation of the Vect type for every N at compile time!

I've never actually used such a feature, but my understanding is that this is not strictly true. I think that the compiler can generically understand that this function adds two vectors and their lengths.

I'll see if I can contrive an example. Supposing you have a list L1 of vectors of length 5. You also have a vector V1 with user input, with length x (unknown at compile time). You then make a new list L2 by taking each vector in L1 and append V1 to it. L2 is now a list of vectors of length (5 + x). Even though x is unknown at compile time, the compiler still knows that all vectors in L2 are of the same length. It can make restrictions based on this fact.

It seemed strange to me when I heard this concept, I thought the compiler would need to consider infinite possibilities, but apparently similar things are possible even in Haskell. For instance, you can define a list as a recursive type that holds a value of a Null type (not just a null value of the list type) or another List. Apparently it can still reason about this.

However, these are things I've heard. Hopefully someone with more experience can chime in and let me know if I'm right here.

Not quite. Types can depend on runtime values. This can in effect _force_ the programmer to perform the required validation when accepting foreign data.

I'm more of a "learn by building things" type of learner. What kinds of things can I build with Haskell?

For example, I got into Ruby via Rails, because Rails lets you quickly prototype simple web apps. So I could go from "I wish I had an app that does X" to actually building it, deploying it and sharing it with others. What would a similar "learning flow" look like in Haskell? (doesn't have to be web-based)

Put another way, when I come across a problem, how do I recognize it as the type of problem that is best solved using Haskell, vs. an imperative language?

Of course not. In my understanding, the article was about static type checking, though.

Thank you, I had read the FAQ:

http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/faq/faq.html

but could not infer why a dragon from Ivor the engine had been chosen. That the author had previously written a proof engine makes all the sense now. :)

1ML doesn't really unify the type and value languages. First-class modules are syntactic sugar over System F-omega, which means that the elaboration/type-checking phase of 1ML duly splits modules into type and value components, which live in separate worlds.

Personally, I find 1ML's approach more pragmatic, or, at least, easier to digest for most programmers - including Haskell programmers. Dependent types are more powerful, but they aren't free from complications. For instance, unifying the type and value languages willy-nilly can cause trouble if you want your value language to be Turing-complete, because now type-level computation can diverge too! In a language based on System F-omega, type-level computation is guaranteed not to diverge, because its type level is the simply typed lambda calculus. Some use cases might warrant providing more powerful type-level computation facilities (e.g. calculating the shapes of multidimensional matrices), but it isn't clear to me that the full power of a Martin-Loef-style dependent type theory is needed.

> There's nothing about braces that ensures visual cues to nested code.

A machine can look at the braces and re-indent the code, so that you don't have to look at the braces. All while you rest assured that the meaning didn't change:

I just popped it into Vim, selected all and hit =:

  int func()
  {
    while dosomething()
    {
      dosomething()
        dosomething()
        doanotherthing()
    }
    dosomething()
  }

Some semicolons are expected so things are a little off.

I've never used a language where space indentation was used over curly brackets. So question for those who have... When doing so, wouldn't copying and pasting code around potentially cause a lot of accidental issues? Are there some negatives and side effects of the indentation style? Just curious.