Mike Gerwitz
6d39474127
Alright, this has been a rather tortured experience. The previous commit
began to state what is going on.
This is reversing a lot of prior work, with the benefit of
hindsight. Little bit of history, for the people who will probably never
read this, but who knows:
As noted at the top of NIR, I've long wanted a very simple set of general
primitives where all desugaring is done by the template system---TAME is a
metalanguage after all. Therefore, I never intended on having any explicit
desugaring operations.
But I didn't have time to augment the template system to support parsing on
attribute strings (nor am I sure if I want to do such a thing), so it became
clear that interpolation would be a pass in the compiler. Which led me to
the idea of a desugaring pass.
That in turn spiraled into representing the status of whether NIR was
desugared, and separating primitives, etc, which lead to a lot of additional
complexity. The idea was to have a Sugared and Plan NIR, and further within
them have symbols that have latent types---if they require interpolation,
then those types would be deferred until after template expansion.
The obvious problem there is that now:
1. NIR has the complexity of various types; and
2. Types were tightly coupled with NIR and how it was defined in terms of
XML destructuring.
The first attempt at this didn't go well: it was clear that the symbol types
would make mapping from Sugared to Plain NIR very complicated. Further,
since NIR had any number of symbols per Sugared NIR token, interpolation was
a pain in the ass.
So that lead to the idea of interpolating at the _attribute_ level. That
seemed to be going well at first, until I realized that the token stream of
the attribute parser does not match that of the element parser, and so that
general solution fell apart. It wouldn't have been great anyway, since then
interpolation was _also_ coupled to the destructuring of the document.
Another goal of mine has been to decouple TAME from XML. Not because I want
to move away from XML (if I did, I'd want S-expressions, not YAML, but I
don't think the team would go for that). This decoupling would allow the
use of a subset of the syntax of TAME in other places, like CSVMs and YAML
test cases, for example, if appropriate.
This approach makes sense: the grammar of TAME isn't XML, it's _embedded
within_ XML. The XML layer has to be stripped to expose it.
And so that's what NIR is now evolving into---the stripped, bare
repsentation of TAME's language. That also has other benefits too down the
line, like a REPL where you can use any number of syntaxes. I intend for
NIR to be stack-based, which I'd find to be intuitive for manipulating and
querying packages, but it could have any number of grammars, including
Prolog-like for expressing Horn clauses and querying with a
Prolog/Datalog-like syntax. But that's for the future...
The next issue is that of attribute types. If we have a better language for
NIR, then the types can be associated with the NIR tokens, rather than
having to associate each symbol with raw type data, which doesn't make a
whole lot of sense. That also allows for AIR to better infer types and
determine what they ought to be, and further makes checking types after
template application natural, since it's not part of NIR at all. It also
means the template system can naturally apply to any sources.
Now, if we take that final step further, and make attributes streaming
instead of aggregating, we're back to a streaming pipeline where all
aggregation takes place on the ASG (which also resolves the memcpy concerns
worked around previously, also further simplifying `ele_parse` again, though
it sucks that I wasted that time). And, without the symbol types getting
in the way, since now NIR has types more fundamentally associated with
tokens, we're able to interpolate on a token stream using simple SPairs,
like I always hoped (and reverted back to in the previous commit).
Oh, and what about that desugaring pass? There's the issue of how to
represent such a thing in the type system---ideally we'd know statically
that desugaring always lowers into a more primitive NIR that reduces the
mapping that needs to be done to AIR. But that adds complexity, as
mentioned above. The alternative is to just use the templat system, as I
originally wanted to, and resolve shortcomings by augmenting the template
system to be able to handle it. That not only keeps NIR and the compiler
much simpler, but exposes more powerful tools to developers via TAME's
metalanguage, if such a thing is appropriate.
Anyway, this creates a system that's far more intuitive, and far
simpler. It does kick the can to AIR, but that's okay, since it's also
better positioned to deal with it.
Everything I wrote above is a thought dump and has not been proof-read, so
good luck! And lets hope this finally works out...it's actually feeling
good this time. The journey was necessary to discover and justify what came
out of it---everything I'm stripping away was like a cocoon, and within it
is a more beautiful and more elegant TAME.
DEV-13346
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| build-aux | ||
| core | ||
| design/tpl | ||
| doc | ||
| progtest | ||
| rater | ||
| src | ||
| tamer | ||
| test | ||
| tools | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .gitlab-ci.yml | ||
| .gitmodules | ||
| .rev-xmle | ||
| .rev-xmlo | ||
| COPYING | ||
| COPYING.FDL | ||
| HACKING | ||
| Makefile.am | ||
| README.md | ||
| RELEASES.md | ||
| VERSION.in | ||
| bootstrap | ||
| c1map.xsd | ||
| configure.ac | ||
| package-lock.json | ||
README.md
TAME
TAME is The Algebraic Metalanguage, a programming language and system of tools designed to aid in the development, understanding, and maintenance of systems performing numerous calculations on a complex graph of dependencies, conditions, and a large number of inputs.
This system was developed at Ryan Specialty Group (formerly LoVullo Associates) to handle the complexity of comparative insurance rating systems. It is a domain-specific language (DSL) that itself encourages, through the use of templates, the creation of sub-DSLs. TAME itself is at heart a calculator—processing only numerical input and output—driven by quantifiers as predicates. Calculations and quantifiers are written declaratively without concern for order of execution.
The system has powerful dependency resolution and data flow capabilities.
TAME consists of a macro processor (implementing a metalanguage), numerous compilers for various targets (JavaScript, HTML documentation and debugging environment, LaTeX, and others), linkers, and supporting tools. The input grammar is XML, and the majority of the project (including the macro processor, compilers, and linkers) is written in a combination of XSLT and Rust.
TAMER
Due to performance requirements, this project is currently being reimplemented in Rust. That project can be found in the tamer/ directory.
Documentation
Compiled documentation for the latest release is available via our GitLab mirror, which uses the same build pipeline as we do on our internal GitLab instance. Available formats are:
Getting Started
To get started, make sure Saxon version 9 or later is available and its path
set as SAXON_CP; that the path to hoxsl is set via HOXSL; and then run
the bootstrap script:
$ export SAXON_CP=/path/to/saxon9he.jar
$ export HOXSL=/path/to/hoxsl/root
$ ./boostrap
Running Test Cases
To run the test cases, invoke make check (or its alias, make test).
Testing Core Features
In order to run tests located at core/test/core/**, a supporting environment
is required. (e.g. mega rater). Inside a supporting rater, either check out a
submodule containing the core tests, or temporarily add them into the
submodule.
Build the core test suite summary page using:
$ make rater/core/test/core/suite.html
Visit the summary page in a web browser and click the Calculate Premium button. If all test cases pass, it will yield a value of $1.
Hacking
Information for TAME developers can be found in the file HACKING.
License
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.