Introduction

Egel is a small scripting language based on untyped eager combinator rewriting. Or, equivalently, it is an untyped lambda calculus with constants and strict semantics.

It roughly falls into the same category of combinator languages like SASL/KRC and conceptually predates languages like Miranda, ML or Haskell.

The language is homoiconic and supports symbolic rewriting, exceptions, namespaces, and concurrency.

Semantically, the implementation is morally equivalent to an eager term rewriter on a directed acyclic graph with a small twist for performance.

To get a taste of the language an example is shown below.

namespace Fibonacci (
    using System

    def fib =
        [ 0 -> 1
        | 1 -> 1
        | N -> fib (N - 2) + fib (N - 1) ]
)

using Fibonacci

def main = fib 5

The interpreter is implemented in C++. Sources can be downloaded from Github.