The Insomnia Programming Language

Insomnia is a strongly typed probabilistic programming language.

Slogans:

• A model is a distribution over modules.
• Model sealing is marginalization.

Documentation

There is a (fairly sparse at this point) Insomnia User's Guide

Some examples are in pretty good shape. See:

• normal.ism
• tugOfWar.ism

Building from source - installation instructions

Cabal sandbox workflow

1. Make sure you have a recent GHC (7.6+, but 7.8+ is better)

2. Make sure you have a recent cabal with support for sandboxes

    $ cabal --version
    cabal-install version 1.20.0.3
    using version 1.20.0.0 of the Cabal library
   

3. Setup a cabal sandbox in the current directory.

    $ cabal sandbox init
   

   This creates a sandbox for insomnia in the current directory.

4. Run the usual cabal build

    $ cabal install --enable-tests --only-dependencies
    $ cabal configure --enable-tests
    $ cabal build
    $ cabal test
   

   Note that installing the upstream dependencies may take a significant amount of time.

5. Try an example in the interpreter

    $ dist/build/insomnia/insomnia examples/query.ism
   

   The expected output is a message that the file typechecked okay, followed by a pretty-printing of the source code, followed by the state of the type unification algorithm at the end of typechecking, followed by the elaboration to core FΩ, followed by something like:

    --------------------✂✄--------------------
    Typechecking FΩ
    FOmega type is: 
    {M : Dist {x : {val : Int}}}
    
    
    --------------------✂✄--------------------
    Running FΩ
    pack
    inj Cons
    {#0 = {x = {val = 1}},
    ... several dozen more lines of output ...
   

   (Sorry, the backend is a work in progress)

Building HTML and PDF versions of the User's guide:

The documentation is in Markdown format. You will need Pandoc to build HTML and PDF versions.

make -C docs

Compiler

There is an insomnia compiler, called insomniac that outputs Gamble code. It's also a work in progress.

    $ dist/build/insomniac/insomniac examples/evalSimplest.ism