The Y Programming Language

Y is a powerful language with four main features: Portability, Explicitness, A Powerful Type System, Efficiency. The compiler/interpreter for Y is the YCI.

Y source can compile to an intermediate language or a binary executable. The intermediate can then be interpreted, if needed, or easily compiled to a binary. This along with other structures allows Y to run on almost any hardware or Operating System, a user to simply download an intermediate file without needing to worry about which platform it's for, and a developer to compile a program to a single intermediate file and simply release to the program's users.

Y maps completely to Assemblies with explicit and powerful control; for example, the basic type vector will use the processor’s vector operations if the program is compiled for an architecture that has them, and the circular shift instructions are given operators.

In Y, types can compose other types. Because the type system of Y is completely hierarchical, this Type Composition is semantic and thus can be inspected at compiletime or runtime if need be. Also, the feature of Size Abstraction allows types like matrix to have size as a semantic part of its type.

Y has powerful and portable optimizations by optimizing on semantics. This system, Constant Expression Collapsing, makes Constant Expressions evaluated at compiletime and can be used for anything from evaluating complex computations to packing data into the program or creating a GUI installer that allows you to set certain parameters during compilation.