Clean (programming language)

Clean

Paradigm	functional
Designed by	Software Technology Research Group of Radboud University Nijmegen
First appeared	1987; 37 years ago (1987)
Stable release	3.1 / 5 January 2022; 2 years ago (2022-01-05)
Typing discipline	strong, static, dynamic
OS	Cross-platform
License	Simplified BSD[1]
Filename extensions	.icl, .dcl, .abc
Website	clean.cs.ru.nl
Influenced by
Lean, Miranda, Haskell
Influenced
Haskell, Idris[2]

Clean is a general-purpose purely functional computer programming language. It was called the Concurrent Clean System,^[3] then the Clean System,^[4][5] later just Clean. Clean has been developed by a group of researchers from the Radboud University in Nijmegen since 1987.^[6]

Features

The language Clean first appeared in 1987.^[7] Although development of the language has slowed, some researchers are still working in the language.^[8] In 2018, a spin-off company was founded that uses Clean.^[9]

Clean shares many properties and syntax with a younger sibling language, Haskell: referential transparency, list comprehension, guards, garbage collection, higher order functions, currying, and lazy evaluation. However, Clean deals with mutable state and input/output (I/O) through a uniqueness type system, in contrast to Haskell's use of monads. The compiler takes advantage of the uniqueness type system to generate more efficient code, because it knows that at any point during the execution of the program, only one reference can exist to a value with a unique type. Therefore, a unique value can be changed in place.^[10]

An integrated development environment (IDE) for Microsoft Windows is included in the Clean distribution.

Examples

Hello world:

Start = "Hello, world!"

Factorial:

fac :: Int -> Int
fac 0 = 1
fac n = n * fac (n-1)

Start = fac 10

fac :: Int -> Int
fac n = prod [1..n] // The product of the numbers 1 to n

Start = fac 10

Fibonacci sequence:

fib :: Int -> Int
fib 0 = 1
fib 1 = 1
fib n = fib (n - 2) + fib (n - 1) 

Start = fib 7

fibs :: Int Int -> [Int]
fibs x_2 x_1 = [x_2:fibs x_1 (x_2 + x_1)]

fib :: Int -> Int
fib n = (fibs 1 1) !! n

Start = fib 7

Infix operator:

(^) infixr 8 :: Int Int -> Int
(^) x 0 = 1
(^) x n = x * x ^ (n-1)

The type declaration states that the function is a right associative infix operator with priority 8: this states that x*x^(n-1) is equivalent to x*(x^(n-1)) as opposed to (x*x)^(n-1). This operator is pre-defined in StdEnv, the Clean standard library.

How Clean works

Computing is based on graph rewriting and reduction. Constants such as numbers are graphs and functions are graph rewriting formulas. This, combined with compiling to native code, makes Clean programs which use high abstraction run relatively fast according to The Computer Language Benchmarks Game.^[11]

Compiling

Compilation of Clean to machine code is performed as follows:

1. Source files (.icl) and definition files (.dcl) are translated into Core Clean, a basic variant of Clean, by the compiler frontend written in Clean.
2. Core clean is converted into Clean's platform-independent intermediate language (.abc), by the compiler backend written in Clean and C.
3. Intermediate ABC code is converted to object code (.o) by the code generator written in C.
4. Object code is linked with other files in the module and the runtime system and converted into a normal executable using the system linker (when available) or a dedicated linker written in Clean on Windows.

Earlier versions of the Clean compiler were written completely in C, thus avoiding bootstrapping issues.

The ABC machine

The ABC code mentioned above is an intermediate representation for an abstract machine. Because machine code generation for ABC code is relatively straightforward, this makes it easy to support new architectures. The ABC machine is an imperative abstract graph rewriting machine.^[12] It consists of a graph store to hold the Clean graph that is being rewritten and three stacks. The A(rgument)-stack holds arguments that refer to nodes in the graph store. The B(asic value)-stack holds basic values (integers, characters, reals, etc.). While not strictly necessary (all these elements could be nodes in the graph store as well), using a separate stack is much more efficient. The C(ontrol)-stack holds return addresses for flow control. The runtime system, which is linked into every executable, builds a Start node in the graph store and pushes it on the A-stack. It then begins printing it, evaluating it as needed.

Running Clean in the browser

Although Clean is typically used to generative native executables, several projects have enabled applications in web browsers. The now abandoned SAPL project compiled Core Clean to JavaScript and did not use ABC code. Since 2019, an interpreter for ABC code, written in WebAssembly, is used instead.^[13][14]

Platforms

Clean is available for Microsoft Windows (IA-32 and X86-64), macOS (X86-64), and Linux (IA-32, X86-64, and AArch64).^{[citation needed]}

Some libraries are not available on all platforms, like ObjectIO which is only available on Windows. Also the feature to write dynamics to files is only available on Windows.^{[citation needed]}

The availability of Clean per platform varies with each version:^[15][16]

Comparison to Haskell

A 2008 benchmark showed that Clean native code performs similarly to the Haskell (Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC)), depending on the benchmark.^[17]

Syntactic differences

The syntax of Clean is very similar to that of Haskell, with some notable differences:^[10]

[ x | x <- [1..10] , isOdd x]

[ x \\ x <- [1..10] | isOdd x]

x:xs

[x:xs]

data Tree a
  = Empty
  | Node (Tree a) a (Tree a)

:: Tree a
  = Empty
  | Node (Tree a) a (Tree a)

(Eq a, Eq b) => ...

... | Eq a & Eq b

fun t@(Node l x r) = ...

fun t=:(Node l x r) = ...

if x > 10 then 10 else x

if (x > 10) 10 x

In general, Haskell has introduced more syntactic sugar than Clean.

References

External links

• Clean Wiki
• clean-lang.org: public registry with Clean packages
• cloogle.org: a search engine to search in Clean packages

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