skijack

A surface language over the $SKI$ combinator calculus that compiles to closed {S,K,I} terms, with the interpreter of the companion paper as its conformance target.

The claim this package exists to support: the abstraction is free, and term equality proves it. The self-interpreter of Davis (2027)---618 atoms of pure {S,K,I}, built by hand---compiles from three lines of surface source to the same term, atom for atom. So do five more: the observability pair at 768 and 771, the blocking interpreters at 950 and 1,066, and structural equality on encoded terms at 240.

Everything is compile-time. Quotation happens in the compiler and nowhere else, because no closed term quotes every live term; the language's job is to make that line visible rather than to pretend it isn't there.

• N E Davis (2027, in review) A Self-Interpreter for $SKI$: Authoring Semantics for New Symbols. Journal of Functional Programming. doi:10.5281/zenodo.22867957
• N E Davis (2027a, in review) SKIjack: A Low-Level Native Language for the $SKI$ Calculus. The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming.

Install

pip install skijack

Requires Python 3.10+ and aviary-kernel, which supplies bracket abstraction, the term representation and the reducer. This package reimplements none of them.

Avon, a C runtime, can run the reductions instead: SKIJACK_REDUCER=avon with AVON naming its binary, or SKIJACK_REDUCER=check to run both and compare (skijack/avon.py). Avon's copy mode gives aviary's statuses, counts and terms.

Use

skijack FILE                     # a summary
skijack FILE --check             # Stage A, then B; exits 1 and lists every problem
skijack FILE --expand            # every compiled term, with atom counts
skijack FILE --dictionary        # the Tier 1 table: name, atoms, hash
skijack FILE --lift NAME         # NAME, with what the table knows named
skijack FILE --render unicode    # the same program in the other lexicon
skijack FILE --run NAME [--fuel N]   # run a level-1 declaration and decode it

The lexicon is taken from the filename (*.unicode.ski) unless --lexicon says otherwise. The twenty-two programs of the conformance corpus ship with the package; eighteen compile, and Stage A refuses the other four for stated reasons:

>>> import skijack
>>> from skijack import corpus
>>> skijack.compile(corpus.read("interp-whnff")).sizes["whnfF"]
618

From Python:

import skijack
exp   = skijack.compile(open("prog.ski").read())   # parse, check, generate, expand
d     = skijack.from_expansion(exp)                # the Tier 1 table
named = skijack.lift(exp.term("whnfF"), d)         # back to named source
out   = skijack.run_level1(exp.level1["answer"], 1_000_000)

Everything this package raises for a bad program derives from skijack.SkijackError, including a refusal by aviary, the host that abstracts and expands, which reaches the caller as an ExpandError.

Definitions

An author writes an equation f x y = body. The closed Y-tied term to which it compiles is the supercombinator, the unit of naming, sharing, jetting and lifting. The group an equation is declared in is a core. Names resolve in a compile-time table and are gone before anything runs; there is no environment at run time.

Tests

pip install skijack[test]
python3 -m pytest -q

Roughly a third of the suite compares compiled terms against the hand-built artifact of the companion paper. Point SKIJACK_ARTIFACT_DIR at a checkout of it, or set SKIJACK_ALLOW_SKIP=1 to run the reduced suite knowingly --- the suite refuses to run silently without its oracle, because what remains would check the compiler only against itself.

More

The language is specified in SPEC.md at the repository root; NOTES.md beside this file is the decision log it was derived from.

NOTES.md records what the suite proves, every open question the specification left and how it was answered, and any discrepancies found in the original specification itself.