Mikrokosmos: an educational lambda calculus interpreter

Abstract

Mikrokosmos is an educational untyped and simply typed lambda-calculus interpreter. For students, it is a tool to learn lambda-calculus and intuitionistic logic by coding. For educators, it is a didactic resource, grounded in the theoretical implementation of a functional programming language, so that they can integrate it with other learning materials. Mikrokosmos can be used on three different environments: (1) as a command line executable, implementing a read-eval-print loop interpreter; (2) as a Jupyter kernel, executing code blocks from a Jupyter notebook (Jupyter Development Team, 2016); and (3) as a Javascript web application, that can be used in conjunction with web text editors such as Codemirror1 to create an online programming environment.