Welcome to the Gobba Programming Language Handbook

gobba

gobba is a dynamically typed and purely functional interpreted programming language, heavily inspired from the OCaml, Haskell and Scheme languages. It is based on Professors Gianluigi Ferrari and Francesca Levi's minicaml interpreter example. The goal for gobba is to be a practical language with built in support for scientific computing, solving some of the problems that exist in other dynamically typed interpreted languages like python and Javascript. A primary goal is also to offer a compromise between solidity, ease of learning and the ability to express ideas quickly in the language.

Features

  • C and Haskell-like syntax with lexical scoping
  • Only immutable variables
  • Dynamically typed
  • Eager (default) and lazy evaluation
  • Simple but effective module system
  • Interactive REPL with readline-like features such as completion, search and hints
  • The REPL has didactical debugging option to print expression ASTs and every reduction step.
  • Static inference to separate pure and impure computations
  • A lot more coming in the next releases...

Thanks to

  • Prof. Gian-Luigi Ferrari and Francesca Levi for teaching us how to project and develop interpreters in OCaml
  • Kevin Fontanari for the pixel art gobba mascotte.
  • Antonio DeLucreziis for helping me implement lazy evaluation.
  • Prof. Alessandro Berarducci for helping me study lambda calculus in deep.
  • Giorgio Mossa for helping me polish the lambda-closure mechanism.