Growing a Syntax

In this paper we present a macro system for the Fortress programming language. Fortress is a new programming language designed for scientific and high-performance computing. Features include: implicit parallelism, transactions, and concrete syntax that emulates mathematical notation. Fortress is intended to grow over time to accommodate the changing needs of its users. Our goal is to design and implement a macro system that allows for such growth. The main challenges are (1) to support extensions to a core syntax rich enough to emulate mathematical notation, (2) to support combinations of extensions from separately compiled macros, and (3) to allow new syntax that is indistinguishable from core language constructs. To emulate mathematical notation, Fortress syntax is specified as a parsing expression grammar (PEG), supporting unlimited lookahead. Macro definitions must be checked for well-formedness before they are expanded and macro uses must be well encapsulated (hygienic, composable, respecting referential transparency). Use sites must be parsed along with the rest of the program and expanded directly into abstract syntax trees. Syntax errors at use sites of a macro must refer to the unexpanded program at use sites, never to definition sites. Moreover, to allow for many common and important uses of macros, mutually recursive definitions should be supported. Our design meets these challenges. The result is a flexible system that allows us not only to support new language extensions, but also to move many constructs of the core language into libraries. New grammar productions are tightly integrated with the Fortress parser, and use sites expand into core abstract syntax trees. Our implementation is integrated into the open-source Fortress reference interpreter.To our knowledge, ours is the first implementation of a modular hygienic macro system based on parsing expression grammars. ∗ Work partially done while visiting Sun Microsystems Laboratories. † Supported by the SIMAP Project under the Danish Strategic Research Council NABIIT-program. Copyright is held by Sun Microsystems, Inc. FOOL ’09 24 January, 2009, Savannah, Georgia, USA. ACM .