Free Variable as Effect, in Practice

Abstract

Variable environment is the time-honored way of making sense of free variables, used in programming language theory as well when writing interpreters and some compilers. Algebraic effects give another way, as was pointed already at HOPE 2017. Although a theoretical curiosity, it may have surprising practical benefits: a new way of writing compilers, with the incremental type-checking, with easy variable usage, leaf function analyses. This work-in-progress report prototypes and illustrates the idea.