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Introduction

comp is a tool for querying information from files. Its main goal is to provide a unified interface to the variety of data representations found in public data sets. To achieve this goal comp introduces a small query language with type coercion (e.g. "2" + 2 == 4) and a powerful iteration mechanism based on list comprehensions.

$ comp '"2" + 2'
4
$ comp '[i | i <- [1, 2, 3], i != 2]'
[ 1, 3 ]
$ comp '[i * j | i <- [1, 2, 3], j <- [10, 20]]'
[ 10, 20, 20, 40, 30, 60 ]

Query files from the command line:

$ curl https://api.github.com/repos/torvalds/linux/commits > commits.json
$ comp -f commits.json '[ i.commit.author.name | i <- commits ]'
$ cat commits.json | comp -f @json '[ i.commit.author.name | i <- in ]'

Syntax Overview

comp defines the following types:

  • scalar - 53, 3.14, "hello", true
  • list - [10, 20, 30], ["a", "b"]
  • object - {id: 123, name: "hello"}

and the following operators:

  • ! - not
  • * / - multiply, divide
  • + - ++ - addition, subtraction, string concatenation
  • < <= > >= - less than [or equal], greater than [or equal]
  • == != =~ - [not] equal, regular expression match
  • && || - logical and, logical or

For example, the following expressions:

"2.14" + 1
8 / 2
3 < 3.14 && 3.14 > 3.13
"hello" ++ " world"

will produce:

3.14
4
true
"hello world"

Iterations are formulated as list comprehensions:

[ e | g1, g2, ..., gN ]

pronounced as "a list of all e where g1 and g2 ... and gN", where e represents an expression and gX is either an iteration over a list or a boolean expression:

[i*2 | i <- [1, 2, 3], i != 2]
[i*j | i <- [1, 2, 3], j <- [10, 20]]

will produce:

[1, 6]
[10, 20, 20, 40, 30, 60]

Build & Test

$ go tool yacc -o y.go -p "comp_" grammar.y
$ go test .
$ go build -o comp .
$ ./comp

Acknowledgements

comp language borrows ideas from other programming languages (Haskell, JavaScript and probably others), but its core - the application of comprehensions to formulate queries - is based on a research paper by Peter Buneman "Comprehension Syntax". I explored this paper thanks to feedback provided by Ted Leung after the Emerging Languages Camp regarding Bandicoot. comp tool was originally developed as a backend to serve public data sets at mingle.io.