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AlgebraicJulia / Catlab.jl

A framework for applied category theory in the Julia language
https://www.algebraicjulia.org
MIT License
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Renaming `@parse_wiring_diagram` #88

Closed jpfairbanks closed 4 years ago

jpfairbanks commented 4 years ago

Can we pick a shorter name for @parse_wiring_diagram? I have been putting presentations and wiring diagrams in slides and the name is kinda long. It would be better to have it be something short like @diagram or @program. I don't think the word parse needs to be there because the fact that it is a macro indicates that it operates on the expression that follows. And we only have one kind of diagram in Catlab, so I don't think it needs wiring either.

If in the future, we want to have a macro for specifying commutative diagrams, then we could call that @cd like tikz-cd.

epatters commented 4 years ago

I'm OK with something like @program.

jpfairbanks commented 4 years ago

That name works for me.

In keeping with your goal of decoupling the macros from the underlying implementations. Maybe https://github.com/epatters/Catlab.jl/blob/c1c2999f6e921028c942011c4e985559c9316ccf/src/programs/JuliaPrograms.jl#L241 should return a Catlab.Programs.Program object that you then convert to a wiring diagram with to_wiring_diagram. I could see some utility in having a representation of the program as an AST that you could manipulate before conversion to a WD. And then on they way back to code the compile_expr could take a WD and return a Program. Maybe Expr is the right data structure for this and we don't need to introduce a Program struct. This might be out of scope for a simple renaming issue, but I think "What is the best datastructure for storing 'catlab program notation'?" is worth thinking about.