Running Elm as a Blackbox

The functional programming language Elm is best known for writing web apps. You can also use Elm to write a headless “black box” app that you talk to via the terminal. Here is a sample session:

Start the program with the command elm-bb, then type your own commands. In this example, the commands are integers which the black box factors into primes. The set-up I will describe here has the following architecture:

On the left is the terminal, where you type your commands. Next is a 29-line Javascript program that talks to both the terminal and Main.elm. Main.elm imports a module Blackbox that exposes a function

   transform : String -> String

When Main.elm receives a string input from the terminal, it computes output = transform input and sends this string back to the terminal. Thus, to change the behavior of the system, it suffices to change the black box. In the example above, we installed the black box using

    import Factor as Blackbox

in Main.elm. To do statistics instead of factoring integers, we would say

    import Statistics as Blackbox

then recompile. Here is a session that results from this change:

There is also a :help command, whose text is defined by helpString in whatever black box module you import. And here is is the help screen that one includes with most black box apps:

Note that there are a number of operations for working with files. These are defined in Main.elm, and so are available to any black box app. The command :get FILE loads a file and stores it in memory. The command :calc applies transform to the contents of memory. This command can take arguments. Thus :calc col=5 calculates statistics for column 5 of the data stored in memory, while :calc col=5 rows=100:200 does the same, but only for rows 100 through 200. You can also bypass file operations entirely, applying transform directly to data:

The code for all this is on GitHub. Just clone it, import the black box of your choice (or better, write your own). Compile with sh make.sh Link to the global command elm-bb with

    ln -s PATH_TO/src/repl.js /usr/local/bin/elm-bb

where of course you have to set PATH_TO. That is all there is to it!