Day 3 -- JavaScript in a week

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I made many commits but most of them were improvements for internal structure. Actual new features are if and (strict) equal/notequal.

if

I implemented if as an expression like a ? b : c as below.

(defn evaluate [expr env]
  "assumption: env won't change"
  (if (list? expr)
    (let [[car & cdr] expr]
      (case car
        if (let [[cond- then- else-] cdr]
             (if (js-boolean (evaluate cond- env))
               (evaluate then- env)
               (evaluate else- env)))
        ...snip...

Too straightforward to explain. Since cond looked ambiguous to Clojure's one, so I added dash as suffix, and just for naming consistency, I added it to all the names..

equal/not equal

Strict equal (===)

Returns true if the operands are strictly equal (see above) with no type conversion.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Comparison_Operators

Luckily I could simply use Clojure's = function.

(defn evaluate [expr env]
  "assumption: env won't change"
  (if (list? expr)
    (let [[car & cdr] expr]
      (case car
        if (let [[cond- then- else-] cdr]
             (if (js-boolean (evaluate cond- env))
               (evaluate then- env)
               (evaluate else- env)))
        function (let [params (first cdr)
                       body (second cdr)]
                   {:type :function :params params :body body})
        fcall (let [func (evaluate (first cdr) env)
                    args (map #(evaluate % env) (second cdr))]
                (case func
                  console.log (println (js-string (first args)))
                  + (if (every? number? args)
                      (+ (first args) (second args))
                      (str (js-string (first args)) (js-string (second args))))
                  === (= (first args) (second args))
                  !== (not= (first args) (second args))
                  (if (= (:type func) :function)
                    (let [applied-params (into {} (map (fn [x y] [x y])
                                                       (:params func)
                                                       args))]
                      (run- (:body func) (merge env applied-params)))
                    (prn 'must-not-happen 'missing-function func))))
        quote (get env (first cdr) 'missing-local-var)
        expr))
    expr))

Now you have if and a predicate function, you can make a safe loop with recursive function calls.

var f = function(n) {
  (n === 10) ? console.log('end') : f(n + 1);
}
f();

It'll be represented as the below.

(run '[(var f (function [n]
                        [(fcall 'console.log ['n])
                         (if (fcall '=== ['n 10])
                           (fcall 'console.log ["end"])
                           (fcall 'f [(fcall '+ ['n 1])]))]))
       (fcall 'f [0])])

It outputs 0 to 10 and "end"

Refactoring to make it more declarative

You may have noticed that the evaluate function is already long and have guessed that it would get longer and longer as I add more builtin functions. First I made change to separate each built-in functions with updating a global variable *builtins*. That's still not well readable because of the boilerplate code. I made another change to provide defbuiltin macro. Now you can add a new builtin function with like the following code.

(defbuiltin + [x y]
  (if (and (number? x) (number? y))
    (+ x y)
    (str (js-string x) (js-string y))))

It looks very like Clojure's defn.