### 4A First Taste of Desugaring

We’ve begun with a very spartan arithmetic language. Let’s look at how we might extend it with more arithmetic operations that can nevertheless be expressed in terms of existing ones. We’ll add just two, because these will suffice to illustrate the point.

#### 4.1Extension: Binary Subtraction

First, we’ll add subtraction. Because our language already has numbers, addition, and multiplication, it’s easy to define subtraction: $$a - b = a + -1 \times b$$.

Okay, that was easy! But now we should turn this into concrete code. To do so, we face a decision: where does this new subtraction operator reside? It is tempting, and perhaps seems natural, to just add one more rule to our existing ArithC datatype.

Do Now!

What are the negative consequences of modifying ArithC?

This creates a few problems. The first, obvious, one is that we now have to modify all programs that process ArithC. So far that’s only our interpreter, which is pretty simple, but in a more complex implementation, that could already be a concern. Second, we were trying to add new constructs that we can define in terms of existing ones; it feels slightly self-defeating to do this in a way that isn’t modular. Third, and most subtly, there’s something conceptually wrong about modifying ArithC. That’s because ArithC represents our core language. In contrast, subtraction and other additions represent our user-facing, surface language. It’s wise to record conceptually different ideas in distinct datatypes, rather than shoehorn them into one. The separation can look a little unwieldy sometimes, but it makes the program much easier for future developers to read and maintain. Besides, for different purposes you might want to layer on different extensions, and separating the core from the surface enables that.

Therefore, we’ll define a new datatype to reflect our intended surface syntax terms:
 (define-type ArithS [numS (n : number)] [plusS (l : ArithS) (r : ArithS)] [bminusS (l : ArithS) (r : ArithS)] [multS (l : ArithS) (r : ArithS)])
This looks almost exactly like ArithC, other than the added case, which follows the familiar recursive pattern.

Given this datatype, we should do two things. First, we should modify our parser to also parse - expressions, and always construct ArithS terms (rather than any ArithC ones). Second, we should implement a desugar function that translates ArithS values into ArithC ones.

Let’s write the obvious part of desugar:

 (define (desugar [as : ArithS]) : ArithC (type-case ArithS as [numS (n) (numC n)] [plusS (l r) (plusC (desugar l) (desugar r))] [multS (l r) (multC (desugar l) (desugar r))] ))
Now let’s convert the mathematical description of subtraction above into code:

 [bminusS (l r) (plusC (desugar l) (multC (numC -1) (desugar r)))]

Do Now!

It’s a common mistake to forget the recursive calls to desugar on l and r. What happens when you forget them? Try for yourself and see.

#### 4.2Extension: Unary Negation

Now let’s consider another extension, which is a little more interesting: unary negation. This forces you to do a little more work in the parser because, depending on your surface syntax, you may need to look ahead to determine whether you’re in the unary or binary case. But that’s not even the interesting part!

There are many ways we can desugar unary negation. We can define it naturally as $$-b = 0 - b$$, or we could abstract over the desugaring of binary subtraction with this expansion: $$-b = 0 + -1 \times b$$.

Do Now!

Which one do you prefer? Why?

It’s tempting to pick the first expansion, because it’s much simpler. Imagine we’ve extended the ArithS datatype with a representation of unary negation:
 [uminusS (e : ArithS)]
Now the implementation in desugar is straightforward:
 [uminusS (e) (desugar (bminusS (numS 0) e))]
Let’s make sure the types match up. Observe that e is a ArithS term, so it is valid to use as an argument to bminusS, and the entire term can legally be passed to desugar. It is therefore important to not desugar e but rather embed it directly in the generated term. This embedding of an input term in another one and recursively calling desugar is a common pattern in desugaring tools; it is called a macro (specifically, the “macro” here is this definition of uminusS).

However, there are two problems with the definition above:
1. The first is that the recursion is generative, which forces us to take extra care.If you haven’t heard of generative recursion before, read the section on it in How to Design Programs. Essentially, in generative recursion the sub-problem is a computed function of the input, rather than a structural piece of it. This is an especially simple case of generative recursion, because the “function” is simple: it’s just the bminusS constructor. We might be tempted to fix this by using a different rewrite:
 [uminusS (e) (bminusS (numS 0) (desugar e))]
which does indeed eliminate the generativity.

Do Now!

Unfortunately, this desugaring transformation won’t work at all! Do you see why? If you don’t, try to run it.

2. The second is that we are implicitly depending on exactly what bminusS means; if its meaning changes, so will that of uminusS, even if we don’t want it to. In contrast, defining a functional abstraction that consumes two terms and generates one representing the addition of the first to -1 times the second, and using this to define the desugaring of both uminusS and bminusS, is a little more fault-tolerant.

You might say that the meaning of subtraction is never going to change, so why bother? Yes and no. Yes, it’s meaning is unlikely to change; but no, its implementation might. For instance, the developer may decide to log all uses of binary subtraction. In the macro expansion, all uses of unary negation would also get logged, but they would not in the second expansion.

Fortunately, in this particular case we have a much simpler option, which is to define $$-b = -1 \times b$$. This expansion works with the primitives we have, and follows structural recursion. The reason we took the above detour, however, is to alert you to these problems, and warn that you might not always be so fortunate.