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[Corbin Simpson <mostawesomedude AT gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I'm working on formalizing Kernel-E, a subset of the E language, since it has never had a formal semantics and I'm hoping to pin down exactly what a fast implementation of E would need to pay attention to. In the process, I'm discovering lots of fun things...

Everything's an object in E and objects interact with message passing; i.e. `obj.doThings(with, other, objects)`. I need to specialize some messages, like `mul`, to implement the concrete semantics for types like integers, which are core to the syntax and semantics.

However, I can't quite figure out how to match on the Id sort in rules. I've currently tried these two variants with no success:

rule E:Int . "mul" ( (X:Int) ) => E *Int X
rule E:Int . mul ( (X:Int) ) => E *Int X

Where the syntax generating the original pattern is:

syntax Exprs ::= List{Expr, ","}
syntax Expr ::= Expr "." Id "(" Exprs ")" [seqstrict]

I've been through many of the tutorial videos but haven't seen a language where specialization is handled this way. Do I have to specialize every one of these special messages in the syntax?

Thanks,
~ C.

--
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? ~ Keynes

Corbin Simpson
<MostAwesomeDude AT gmail.com>