mocach

Note: Mocach is a fictional programming language used here as an illustrative example. It is not an established real-world language or project.

Mocach is a statically typed, functional-first language designed to teach safe concurrency and modular software design. It emphasizes immutability by default, explicit effects, and lightweight concurrent processes known as channels or agents. The language is described as running on a hypothetical MocachVM and compiling to a portable bytecode form.

Design goals for Mocach include simplicity, predictability, and clarity in reasoning about concurrent behavior. Its syntax blends ML-like type inference with Haskell-inspired pattern matching and an actor-friendly concurrency model. Key concepts include a strong type system with inference, algebraic effects for controlling side effects, channels for interprocess communication, and pattern matching for control flow. The standard library focuses on I/O, concurrency primitives, and basic data structures.

Example code in Mocach illustrates its style. A simple function with type annotations:

def add(a: int, b: int) -> int { return a + b }

let sum = add(2, 3)

A concurrent pattern might use spawn and receive to illustrate message-driven processing:

spawn worker -> { let msg = receive() // process msg; send(msg, result) }

Adoption and status are purely fictional within this article. In teaching contexts, Mocach is used to compare functional programming, immutable state, and message-driven concurrency with traditional shared-state approaches. As a hypothetical construct, it serves to explore how language design choices influence reasoning about safety, modularity, and parallelism.