dhall VS egison

```

If you mean installing Dhall's dependencies (https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...), those aren't too crazy, but they're definitely not all "beginner level". Template Haskell in particular is quite heavyweight.

Ok, lets be specific. Lets write a comment to explain this function:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...

I haven't tried it but apparently you can compile to Nix from Dhall:

> You can use this compiler to program Nix using the Dhall language. This package targets people who wish Nix had a type system.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

If the problem is the syntax and people wants some other format that compiles to nix, there's dhall

https://dhall-lang.org/

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

https://www.haskellforall.com/2017/01/typed-nix-programming-...

Dhall is a generic config language with some programming capabilities (but not turing complete) that can compile to json, yaml, and other formats, like in this instance nix.

For my GSoC project, I built from scratch the dhall-csv package on the Dhall Haskell implementation Github Repository. Said package provides two executables, dhall-to-csv (which converts Dhall files into CSV files) and csv-to-dhall (which converts CSV files into Dhall files). It also provides Haskell libraries with the functions that translate bidirectionally between Dhall and CSV.

> If you add constraints (like not being able to feed the program to itself as is done in the halting problem and not allowing unbounded loops) then it is possible to determine if a program will terminate or not.

Dhall is a good example - https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell .

See also https://dhall-lang.org/

That just seems like an even greater nightmare to me. Soon you would have to learn to read and understand a custom program in a Turing-complete language for each and every installation.

The proper solution is a DSL, just a better DSl. Or perhaps a DSL embedded in something like dhall <https://dhall-lang.org/>, but definitely not a general-purpose programming language.

Look into egison, a "Pattern-Match-Oriented language": https://www.egison.org/

Have a look at Egison. It should be a source of inspiration to anyone doing generalised pattern matching. [_,_/2] ~= [2,1]|[6,3] in particular is even clearer in Egison: $p :: #(p / 2).

I think this is a bad idea. In fact, Egison offers a precedent with a better approach. The offered alternative is strictly more powerful as it allows you to refer to a single subpattern multiple times in a greater pattern, and even marks a computable expression you can use in patterns, allowing code like

Egison language. Research language that does some really neat stuff with pattern matching.

Egison is weird https://www.egison.org -- it takes a single concept (pattern matching) and pushes it as far as it will go.