Internals

Robotlang covers quite a wide range of interesting technologies. First off, it's a functional language. The language started out using recursive descent to evaluate an expression and has moved to a machine based on ideas from the CEK machine. This method of using a machine to go through the evaluation process step by step means that multiple concurrent processes can be switched to very quickly using internal context switching rather than relying on something like the POSIX threads library.

Each process has its own mailbox that allows processes running to communicate quickly and easily. processes waiting for a message to arrive in their mailbox will block, but due to the way the context switching works this doesn't matter - the process will idle and wait for a message while some other process might send it something.

Reference about the modified CEK machine (xCEK for eXtended CEK) can be found here (Original Tomboy notes file here)