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# The Pure Tutorial

Version 0.52, March 05, 2012

Albert Gräf <Dr.Graef@t-online.de>

Copyright (c) 2011. This document is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. This is work in progress, so please bear with us while we’re slaving away on it. If you’re an experienced programmer and would like to give a helping hand, please contact the first author listed above.

## Introduction

This tutorial introduces the Pure programming language by way of examples, explaining the major elements and concepts of the language along the way. The goal is to help you to quickly gather a basic understanding of Pure and master the initial learning curve.

This document does not pretend to be an introduction to programming in general, so it certainly helps if you already have an idea what programming is all about and some familiarity with at least one other programming language such as C, Python or Lisp. Also, we don’t give an exhaustive account of the Pure language, although we aim to discuss the most important language elements in some detail. Therefore you should consult the other available documentation, in particular The Pure Manual, if you want to learn more.

So what is Pure, anyway? First, it is a functional language, like, say, Lisp and Haskell, but don’t let this scare you. Functional programming languages have a reputation of being difficult to use, which isn’t entirely undeserved in some cases, but the difficulties are often due to a lack of familiarity, as most programmers today still learn their craft using imperative languages such as Pascal, C and Java. It is no wonder that they are then at a loss when they first encounter a language which does (some, not all) things a bit differently. Fortunately, mainstream languages have been picking up powerful and convenient features from functional languages left and right, so that these features nowadays will be a lot more familiar to programmers than, say, 20 years ago. In any case, we hope that after working though this tutorial you get the feeling that Pure lets you solve many typical programming tasks just as easily and elegantly as other programming languages, and in many cases even much more easily and elegantly.

Second, Pure uses term rewriting as its model of computation. What this basically means is that all your function definitions are essentially collections of equations which are used to evaluate expressions in a symbolic fashion. This is probably one of Pure’s most unusual aspects, but it gives the language a lot of power and flexibility. It is also surprisingly easy to understand once you grasp that, on an abstract level, all computations performed by the interpreter are really nothing but sequences of simple algebraic manipulations.

Third, Pure is a dynamically typed language. This is a conscious design decision motivated by the choice of computational model, but it also keeps the language simple and supports a freewheeling, interactive development style. Still, Pure programs are compiled to native code, so that they are executed with reasonable efficiency. Pure can’t really compete with compiled statically typed languages such as Haskell and ML in terms of speed and type safety, but it’s a small yet powerful language which is supposed to be both easy to learn and fun to use.

Fourth, Pure provides a seamless interface to external functions written in C, C++ and Fortran, and thus is open to the imperative world out there and its wealth of useful software libraries. To these ends, despite its name, Pure decidedly is not a “purely” functional language. Performing I/O and doing all kinds of other side-effects is very easy in Pure. In fact, the ease with which you can integrate functions from external libraries and the interactive interpreter-like environment also turn Pure into a useful scripting language for many different purposes.

Typographical Conventions

Throughout the entire Pure documentation, Pure programs are set in typewriter font (adding a moderate amount of syntax highlighting for easier reading). For instance, here is a little Pure program which defines the factorial function:

    fact n = if n>0 then n*fact (n-1) else 1;

Such code fragments can be entered directly at the interpreter’s prompt, but usually you will want to put them into a text file which can then be loaded in the interpreter, as described in the following section.

Often we will also show sample interactions with the Pure interpreter in order to explain how the programs are to be used. For instance, an invocation of the above factorial function may look as follows:

    > map fact (1..10);
    [1,2,6,24,120,720,5040,40320,362880,3628800]

In this example, you are supposed to type `map fact (1..10);` at the command prompt of the interpreter, after which the result `[1,2,6,24,120,720,5040,40320,362880,3628800]` will be printed. In general, all text after the prompt “> ” is meant to be typed exactly as written (including the terminating semicolon), while the other lines indicate results and other responses printed by the interpreter.

In some cases we will show commands to be typed at your system’s command shell, which are indicated as follows (here “$ ” is taken to denote the shell command prompt, which of course varies for different systems):

    $ pure factorial.pure

## Getting Started

Let us start out with a very brief overview of the Pure environment, so that you get a basic understanding of how all the bits and pieces fit together. For the sake of brevity, we strictly keep to the basics which are unlikely to change much with future releases of the Pure environment. For more detailed and up-to-date information, please refer to the Pure website, where you can find the required software and all available documentation, as well as a wiki with additional helpful information. (Since you’re reading this tutorial, most likely you have already discovered this.) Another very useful resource is the Pure mailing list where you can discuss Pure with fellow Pure programmers and ask any questions that you might have.

### The Pure Interpreter

The Pure language is implemented by an interactive program which lets you enter Pure programs and execute them. This program is called the Pure interpreter. If you have used any kind of dynamic programming language such as Lisp, Python or Ruby then you should already be familiar with this concept.[1]

So the first thing that you’ll have to do in order to use Pure is to install the interpreter. For most examples in this text a basic installation (consisting of just the “pure” package containing the interpreter and the standard library) should be all that’s needed. If some piece of code in this text requires any additional software, we will tell you where to find it in due course.

The details of installing the interpreter vary depending on which operating system you use. You should first check whether there’s a binary package for your system, this will make things easier. Otherwise you’ll have to build the interpreter from source code. The necessary steps to do that are rather straightforward once you have all the requisite tools and libraries installed. In particular, you’ll need the GNU C++ compiler and GNU make to compile the program, as well as the LLVM library which provides the compiler back-end the Pure interpreter uses to translate your Pure programs to executable code. Detailed installation instructions can be found in the Installing Pure (and LLVM) manual.

Having completed the installation, you should be able to invoke the interpreter from the command line just like any other program:

    $ pure
    Pure 0.52 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) Copyright (c) 2008-2011 by Albert Graef
    (Type 'help' for help, 'help copying' for license information.)
    Loaded prelude from /usr/local/lib/pure/prelude.pure.

    >

As you can see, the interpreter greets you with a little sign-on message, so that you know that it’s up and running and which version you have, and then leaves you at its command prompt. At this point you can start typing Pure code, such as definitions and expressions to be evaluated:

    > fact n = if n>0 then n*fact (n-1) else 1;
    > map fact (1..10);
    [1,2,6,24,120,720,5040,40320,362880,3628800]

Proceeding in this fashion, you can readily use the interpreter as a sophisticated kind of desktop calculator. Note, however, that even when entering Pure code interactively, you always have to terminate definitions and expressions with a semicolon, as shown above. In contrast to languages like Python, “whitespace” (that is, blanks, tabs and even newlines) are insignificant. That has the advantage that you can break complicated definitions and expressions into multiple lines without having to escape line ends. On the other hand, it means that the interpreter will just keep on sitting idle if you forget to enter the terminating semicolon. This may well happen quite a bit when you begin using Pure, but is nothing to worry about; just enter the semicolon on a line by itself to initiate the computation:

    > 6*7 // oops, forgot the semicolon here
    > ;
    42

To exit from the interpreter when you’re finished, simply type the `quit` command (or the end-of-file character, `Ctrl-D` on Linux, Mac OSX and other Unix-like systems) at the beginning of the command line, immediately after the prompt. This will return you to the shell:

    > quit
    $

Often you may prefer to enter Pure code in a text editor and save it in a text file, called a script, which can then be loaded in the interpreter. This can be done by specifying the name of the script file when invoking the interpreter:[2]

    $ pure -i factorial.pure

Instead, you can also run the script directly from the interpreter’s command prompt like this:

    > run factorial.pure

The interpreter normally offers support for the GNU readline library, which lets you recall previously entered lines, edit them and resubmit the edited lines to the interpreter. This includes a history of past input lines which gets saved and reloaded whenever you exit and restart the interpreter. Another convenient readline feature is the completion of Pure keywords and functions.

It is also possible to edit and run scripts from the Emacs text editor, using Emacs Pure mode, and there is syntax highlighting support for a number of other text editors. More information about alternative ways to invoke the Pure interpreter can be found on the Using Pure wiki page, and the interactive features of the interpreter are discussed at length in the corresponding section of The Pure Manual. Also, the Installing Pure (and LLVM) document explains in detail what you need to do to set up Pure mode for use with Emacs.

### The Standard Library

To equip the language with some useful programming facilities which will be used in almost every Pure program, an installation of the Pure interpreter always comes with a collection of Pure scripts which are collectively referred to as Pure’s standard library. A subset of the standard library, called the prelude, is in fact loaded by default whenever you invoke the interpreter. The prelude defines most of the basic operations of the Pure language, such as arithmetic, logic, string and list processing. Without the prelude the interpreter won’t be of much use for anything, so the first time you run the interpreter you should check that the prelude was properly loaded, which is indicated by a line like the following at the end of the sign-on message:

    Loaded prelude from /usr/local/lib/pure/prelude.pure.

If instead you see an error message which says that the prelude wasn’t found, then there is some problem with your Pure installation which needs to be fixed before you can proceed. Maybe the library got installed in the wrong place or with the wrong access permissions, or the files are just missing. If you can’t figure it out by yourself, consult a local computer wizard, contact the maintainer of the package that you used to install Pure, or ask for help on the Pure mailing list.

Besides the prelude, the standard library contains additional scripts or modules which can be loaded when they are needed, by means of a special kind of `using` declaration, also called an import clause. For instance, the standard library function `sqrt`, which computes the square root of a number, is contained in the `math.pure` library script, which can be loaded as follows:

    > using math;
    > sqrt 2;
    1.4142135623731

Note that you only have to specify the basename of the script file here, the `.pure` filename extension will be added automatically.

There are a number of other useful modules in the standard library which we will introduce as we go along; for the gory details, you may refer to the Pure Library Manual. In addition, there is a growing collection of so-called addon modules, which don’t ship with the interpreter but can be installed separately. You can find an overview of these on the Addons wiki page. And if all that is not enough for your programming needs, Pure also allows you to interface to existing code in other programming languages, such as C and Fortran, quite easily. With the wealth of ready-made libraries available on modern computer systems, this is a real boon, and we will discuss the corresponding facilities of the Pure language later on in this tutorial.

### Hello, World

Assuming that you managed to get the Pure interpreter up and running, you’re now ready to write and execute your first Pure program a.k.a. script. It’s customary to start out with a little program which just prints the text “Hello, world” on the terminal:

    using system;
    puts "Hello, world";

This should be very familiar to C programmers; it is indeed the `puts` function from the C library which is being called here. Note that no special “main” function is needed; the call to `puts` will be evaluated just like any other toplevel expression while the program is being executed. You can put the two lines above into a file called, say, `hello.pure` which can then be invoked from the command line as follows:

    $ pure hello.pure
    Hello, world

That’s it. Congrats, you have just successfully executed your first Pure program!

WIP, to be continued...

Footnotes

[1]

The term “interpreter” is a bit of a misnomer here, since the Pure front-end actually never “interprets” any code, but rather compiles it to native code which can be executed much more efficiently. The front-end does this on the fly, whenever the code first needs to be executed; this is also known as JIT (“just in time”) compilation. All this happens automatically, transparently to the user, so for all practical purposes the system works as if it actually was an interpreter, and offers about the same degree of dynamicity and interactivity.

[2] | Here the `-i` option makes sure that we enter the interactive command loop after loading the script. Otherwise the interpreter would just run the script in batch mode and then exit immediately.

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