Functions in Taxi

Overview

Taxi provides support for declaring functions that can manipulate data.

Taxi itself does not provide implementations of these functions - it's down to individual runtimes, such as Orbital.

Declaring functions

Functions are declared as follows:

namespace com.foo {
   declare function concat(String,String):String
}

This declares a function named com.foo.concat, which accepts two String arguments, and returns a String.

Parameter names

Parameters may be optionally declared with parameter names:

namespace com.foo {
   declare function concat(first: String,second: String):String
}

Vararg parameters

The final parameter in a function may be declared as vararg by providing a trailing ...

namespace com.foo {
   // values is vararg, and can accept multiple values
   declare function concat(something: Int, values:String...):String
}

Using functions

As with all other references, functions must be imported to be used, or referred to using their fully qualified name

Functions in fields

Functions can be used in expressions on models by declaring using a by operator:

import com.foo.concat

model Person {
   firstName : FirstName inherits String
   lastName : LastName inherits String
   fullName : FullName inherits String by concat(FirstName, ' ', LastName)
}

As with all expressions, parameters are passed either by Type reference, or Field reference:

import com.foo.concat

model Person {
   firstName : FirstName inherits String
   lastName : LastName inherits String
   // By default references are assessed as lookups by type.
   fullName : FullName inherits String by concat(FirstName, ' ', LastName)
   // When prefixed by 'this.', lookups are assessed against field names
   formalName : String by concat(this.lastName, ', ', this.firstName)
}

Functions in expression types

Functions may also be used in expression types. When functions are referenced as a type, the underlying base type is optional, and can be inferred by the compiler

declare function concat(String...):String

// FullName inherits String, as that's
// the return type of `concat`
type FullName by concat(FirstName, ' ', LastName)

model Person {
   firstName : FirstName inherits String
   lastName : LastName inherits String
   fullName : FullName
}

Lambda functions

Taxi has support for declaring lambda functions - i.e., functions as parameters to another function.

declare function stringify(Int[], callback:(Int,String) -> String):String

Generic types

Taxi has limited support for generic types in functions.

Type arguments may be before the function name:

declare function <T,A> reduce(T[], (T,A) -> A):A

Taxi Stdlib

Taxi ships with a StdLib which contains a number of functions declared to assist with manipulating data.

Read the docs of the Taxi StdLib here