I’ve had a little time off of work as of late, and been spending it in characteristically unwise ways. In particular, I’ve written a little programming language that compiles to SQL. I call it catlang. That’s not to say that I’ve written a new query language. It’s a programming language, whose compiler spits out one giant SELECT statement. When you run that query in postgres, you get the output of your program.
Why have I done this? Because I needed a funny compilation target to test out the actual features of the language, which is that its intermediary language is a bunch of abstract category theory nonsense. Which I’ll get to. But I’m sure you first want to see this bad boy in action.
If you’re familiar with arrow notation, you’ll notice the above looks kinda like one big proc block. This is not a coincidence (because nothing is a coincidence). I figured if I were to go through all of this work, we might as well get a working arrow desugarer out of the mix. But I digress; that’s a story for another time.
