Ambidexter tutorial
lesson 2
function expressions and builtins

This lesson introduces function expressions, and &-patterns.

built-in names

But first, a list of the simple builtins.

show_boolean : Boolean -> String
show_void : True -> String
plus : Integer -> (Integer -> Integer)
minus : Integer -> (Integer -> Integer)
times : Integer -> (Integer -> Integer)
concat : String -> (String -> String)
substring : Integer -> (Integer -> (String -> String))
string_length : String -> Integer
equals : Integer -> (Integer -> Boolean)
and : Boolean -> (Boolean -> Boolean)
or : Boolean -> (Boolean -> Boolean)
not : Boolean -> Boolean
false : Boolean
true : Boolean
void : True
show_integer : Integer -> String
show_string : String -> String

In addition to the builtins names, there are integer and string literals. 1,2,3,"a","ab","abc" etc.

put

We used trace last time because it will display any type for debugging purposes. put displays a string. It is better-defined than trace, so we won't use trace in any more examples. We can convert things to strings if necessary using functions like show_integer.

    ("abc" put)
    ((false show_boolean) put)
    ((10 show_integer) put)

function expressions

In many languages such as Lisp, Scheme, Python, and Haskell these are called lambda expressions, and Ambidexter uses the same syntax as Haskell.
    ((5 (\x->x 1 plus)) put)
    ((5 (\x->(1 x minus))) put)

If you want to name anything, you may use it as an argument to a function.
    (1 \one ->
     (\x->x one plus) \increment ->
     ((one increment) show_integer) put)

patterns

In place of a function parameter name, you can put a pattern. Ambidexter has several kinds of patterns. The easiest one is the "and" pattern. Recall that in the previous lesson we didn't actually do anything useful with an "and" term. An "and" pattern is how you get at the parts of an "and" value. We name its parts, like this:
    (& part_one & part_two & -> ...)
Use whatever names you like, or omit naming something you don't need a name for. The following function gets the first part of an "and" pair.
    (& first &_& -> first)

There's another simple pattern, for the True type.
    () (\->"OK")
It's a pattern consisting of nothing. If you prefer to see the pattern, you can use parentheses.
    () (\()->"OK")

Notice that True the type and true the value are from two different metaphors based on truth. The type of true and false is Boolean, unrelated to True and False.

Here's an example program that concatenates and displays the second members of two tuples.

exercises

1. Demonstrate the substring function by writing a function that takes a string and returns its last two characters.
2. Use pattern matching to write a program which contains the expression (& 1 & 987654321 &) and which displays
       Your number is 987654321.
3. Which of the following can be done in the subset of Ambidexter covered in today's lesson?
   1. a function which takes a long string and a short string, and which replaces characters of the long string with characters of the short string, beginning with the 10th character of the long string, returning the modified long string
   2. a function which takes a string and an integer n, and which returns a string consisting of n copies of the string concatenated together

critique