1. Introduction

Joxa is a Lisp designed to support general programming with good declarative data description facilities. Joxa is intended to be used as a powerful, light-weight alternative for Erlang for any program any system where a language like Erlang is prefered. Joxa is implemented as a compiler and library, written in itself while still making extensive use of the Erlang libraries and infrastructure.

Joxa is free software, and is provided as usual with no guarantees, as stated in its license. Further information is a available on the Joxa website, www.joxa.org.

1.1. Examples

The very first thing that everyone wants to see when exploring a new language is what it looks like. So to feed that need lets jump right into some examples and descriptions.

1.1.1. Sieve of Eratosthenes

Here we see the Sieve of Eratosthenes implemented as a Joxa Namespace

(ns sieve-of-eratosthenes
        (require lists)
        (use (joxa.core :as core :only (!=/2))
             (erlang :only (rem/2 +/2))))

(defn sieve (v primes)
  (case v
    ([] primes)
    ((h . t)
      (sieve  (lists/filter (fn (x)
                             (!= (rem x h) 0)) t)
              (+ primes 1)))))

(defn+ sieve (v)
  (sieve (lists/seq 2 v) 1))

Now that we have seen the entire namespace lets start breaking it down

(ns sieve-of-eratosthenes
    (require lists)
        (use (joxa.core :as core :only (!=/2))
            (erlang :only (rem/2 +/2))))

The very first thing that must occur in file is the namespace special form. You can call a fully qualified macro to create the namespace, but that macro must create the namespace first. A namespace is defined with the ns special form.

The ns special form consists of three main parts (we will go into greater detail later in this document). The first part is the name of the namespace. Which is an atom that identifies that namespace. Though is not a requirement its generally a good idea for the namespace name match the file name.

The second part of the ns special form is the require form. The require form provides a list of those namespaces that will be used by the namespace. This is not strictly required (namespaces that are used in the namespace being defined but not required will be automatically required). However, it is very good documentation and I encourage you to require all your namespaces.

The third part is the use form. The use form allow you to import functions into the namespace. So you do not have to write the fully qualified name. This is especially useful for functions and macros defined as operators. Don’t go crazy with it though. It is a spice that should be used only where it enhances clarity.

Any number of require and use statements can appear in the namespace in any order.

Next we see the function definition

(defn sieve (v primes)
  (case v
    ([] primes)
    ((h . t)
      (sieve  (lists/filter (fn (x)
                             (!= (rem x h) 0)) t)
              (+ primes 1)))))

We define a function called sieve that takes two arguments. The argument v and, next, the argument primes. We then have a single case expression that forms the body of the function. A case expression allows the author to do pattern matching on the second clause of the expression. While he rest of the clauses identify patterns and what will be evaluate based on the form of the output of the second clause. In this example, you can see that an empty list will return the argument primes unchanged while a cons cell will result in a recursive call of sieve, a call to the erlang module lists with an anonymous function. You can all see the use of the functions (not defined in the namespace) that we imported into the namespace with the use form.

Finally, we define our public api

(defn+ sieve (v)
  (sieve (lists/seq 2 v) 1))

There are two types of function definitions in Joxa; exported and unexported functions. Exported functions are available outside of the namespace while unexported functions are only available inside the namespace itself. The difference in declaration is the use of defn+ for exported functions in place of defn for unexported functions. In this example you see us call the unexperted sieve function and the use again of the lists erlang module. In Joxa, functions must be defined before they are used. So the unexported sieve/2 had to be defined before the exported sieve/1 function.

1.1.2. Fibonacci

Here we see the Fibonacci implemented as a Joxa Namespace

(ns fibonacci
   (use (erlang :only (>/2 -/2 +/2))))

(defn+ fibo (n)
  (case n
    (0 0)
    (1 1)
    (_ (when (> n 0))
     (+ (fibo (- n 1))
        (fibo (- n 2))))))