This is the user manual for CompAnn and Anne language description. Technical details and internals are described in another document.
cann is the compiler that translates the programming language Anne (see Anne) into neural networks. cann is a command-line utility.
cann's usage is very basically oriented at gcc's:
cann [FLAGS] INPUT -o OUTPUT [--sam-dump SAM]
This call compiles the Anne-file INPUT and saves the resulting network to OUTPUT. Optionally (mainly for debugging of the compiler itself) can be requested to dump the SAM tree (as readable text) to the file SAM.
General options allowed as FLAGS:
Additionally allowed are the flags for optimization, See cann Optimization.
To enable compiler optimization fully or partially (only some algorithms), the following flags can be used:
rann is an interpreter for programs in form of ANNs generated by cann.
The usage of rann is basically the following:
rann [FLAGS] ANN [ARGUMENTS]
This call loads the network ANN and executes it. The input arguments passed to the network can be specified directly on the command-line as a sequence of numbers as ARGUMENTS. If that is not or only partially done, the program will ask interactively for the missing values. After the successful execution all output-values are written to stdout.
Flags allowed:
rann is able to collect runtime-statistics during the execution of ANNs. This is great for testing and optimizing the performance of both the compiler itself (and the effectiveness of optimizations) and the Anne-sources of the ANNs.
If statistics are enabled via the command-line flag (see rann Usage), the collected values are dumped to stdout after the execution. Values collected:
Anne is a procedural, structured programming language specifically designed to be compilable into ANNs. The syntax is vaguely based on C but often differes from C or refers to language constructs not existent in C; the description of very C-like syntax however is kept very briefly.
All identifiers, keywords and things like that are handled case-sensitive.
Comments are in Anne both in classical C-multi-line-syntax and in one-line syntax as per C++ and Java possible:
/* This is a
multi-line comment */
// This is a one-line comment
Numbers must be notated in decimal notation without sign or decimal point, that is, simply a sequence of digits:
a=1234;
b=567;
c=04567; // Possible, but nicht octal!
d=0xABC; // Invalid
e=-.5e2; // Invalid
For boolean values the corresponding numbers 0 and 1 can be used
as well as the “constants” true and false.
IDs are identifiers for “named things” like variables or calls. They may consist of alpha-numeric characters, but the first character must not be a digit.
Valid IDs are `abc123', `DanielKraft' or `fooBar', invalid are `0fun', `abc.def' or `daniel_kraft'.
Also invalid are reserved keywords as those are recognized by the parser as keywords and not IDs.
At the moment there's only one flavour of data-types in Anne: unsigned
integers with arbitrary bit-size. The corresponding type is identified by
uintn, where n is the desired number of bits.
With two's complement notation and some corresponding operators one can however also use those numbers as signed if needed.
variable uint16 a; // 16-bit unsigned integer (uint16_t)
variable uint1 b; // boolean value
variable uint64 c; // 64-bit unsigned integer (uint64_t)
variable uint4 d; // 4-bit unsigned integer, range 0-15
The following words are reserved in Anne having some special meaning described in other sections of this manual:
The head of an Anne-program lists all input- followed by the output-arguments of the program. Such a definition follows the syntax:
inout type name;
where inout is depending on the type of definition either
input or output, type the data-type of the defined argument
and name the ID used to reference it later.
input uint4 inNum;
input uint1 inBool;
output uint16 outNum;
output uint1 outBool;
If no input- or output-arguments are needed, the corresponding definitions part can be skiped.
After the arguments one can define callbacks to be used in the program. A callback is somewhat a “native” method that has to be implemented by the runtime-environment and can be used for more complex interaction as is possible by simply passing arguments. The syntax for such a definition is:
callback name(in1, in2...) -> (out1, out2...);
name is the identifier for the callback, inN the type of the N-th callback input-argument and outN the type of the N-th output argument. If there's exactly one output argument the parentheses can be omitted. For a callback entirely without output arguments that's not possible!
callback sum(uint4, uint4) -> uint5;
callback nothing() -> ();
callback swap(uint8, uint8) -> (uint8, uint8);
At this point global variables may be defined; the syntax is the same as for
argument definitions (see Anne InOutArgs), but variable is used
as keyword.
variable uint6 flags;
Not like most other languages where the main code is either in a special
marked area (or a function like main) or the code present outside of
every procedure, in Anne there has to be exactly one statement (see
Anne Statement) after the header that is used as entry-point. This
of course can be a code block (Anne Block) to allow a sequence of
statements as program code.
An expression is everything that has a value (sometimes called Rvalues); they are no commands or statements of themselves but parts of those.
A literal (see Anne Literal) can be used as expression:
a=42; // ``42'' is an expression
b=true; // as is ``true''
A variable (and equivalently an input- or output-parameter) can be referenced by its name; the value of an expression like this is of course the variable's value.
Of course Anne also allows operations and calculations by combining sub-expressions with operators. Possible operators in decreasing order of priority:
(a)~a-a#^b&b|b+b-b<<n>>n<b<=b>b>=b0 or 1 depending on the comparison's result.
==b!=b0 or 1 depending on the comparison's result.
Lvalues are “objects” that can be assigned a (new) value, but they do not necessarily have to also have a value (that is, they need not be Rvalues). Not even after an assignment has taken place.
However, in Anne only variable-references are possible Lvalues (see Anne Expression Variable) which are expressions, too, so this detail is “hidden”.
Assignments are written in Anne as in many other programming languages; an expression gets assigned to an lvalue.
a=42;
b=56^7;
c=(123==0|123);
Short-hand assignments as in C-like languages are also possible, here of course
the target must be lvalue and expression together. Possible operators for this
are: &, |, ^, +, -, << and >>.
a&=4;
b>>=2;
A Call (to a procedure or callback) can be used as statement, too, optinally the return-values can be assigned to some lvalues after the call returns.
The call itself is written as usual, and if return-values are expected, the
operator -> followed by the lvalue-targets (in parentheses if more than
one) should follow it. It is both possible to specify less lvalues than there
are return-values and to skip some return-values in the middle of the list.
voidFunktion();
sum(3, 4) -> a;
swap(a, b) -> (a, b);
swap(4, 3) -> (, c); // c is now 4
If-Then- and If-Then-Else statements are the constructs for conditional execution in Anne. The syntax is similar to C:
if(a==5)
a=0;
if(c!=0)
{
a=c;
c=0;
} else
c=0;
While-Loops are loops whose body is repeated as long a certain condition is true:
a=1;
// While until overflow
while(a!=0)
a<<=1;
Do-While-Loops are also repeated until some condition gets false, but this condition is checked at their end so they get executed at least once:
// Infinite loop
a=0;
do
a=42;
while(a!=0);
Labels name jumping targets; unlike in C they need not be followed by a statement as they generate their own NOP statement (that has no performance costs of course).
See Anne Goto for example.
goto JumpsThe keyword goto followed by a label name allows for direct, simple
jumps:
a=5;
label:
if(a!=5)
goto ende;
a=6;
goto label;
ende:
The command break ends a loop currently executed immediatelly, it's
simply a jump after the loop's end.
An optional constant n specified along with break determines
which of a set of nested loops will be ended. The inner-most n loops
will be cancelled.
while(true)
break;
i=1;
while(true)
{
i<<=1;
j=1;
while(true)
{
j<<=1;
if((j==0)&(i==0))
break 2;
}
}
continue cancells the current loop iteration and proceeds
immediatelly with the next iteration. Like with break a constant may
be specified to identify one of several nested loops, See Anne Break.
// Infinite loop
i=0;
while(i==0)
{
continue;
i=1;
}
Often its useful to place a sequence of statements instead of a single one at some position (for instance if the body of a loop or conditional should consist of more than one statement). This is done via a block notated in curly braces:
{
a=6;
b=7;
}
Inside a block local variables may be declared (similarly to global variables, see Anne VarDecls); those are valid only inside that block. If other variables of the same name are already declared in a parent scope, they are shadowed by the new ones.
{
variable uint4 local;
{
variable uint8 local;
local=128; // 8-bit variable
}
local=128; // Overflow, only 4 bits here
variable uint6 i;
i=12;
}
The simplest form of multi-threading on the Anne-level is asynchronous execution; here, some statement is simply executed in parallel to the current line of execution (that of course can be a block, too, see Anne Block).
This form is very cheap as there are no runtime- and space-costs, but it is not suitable for all purposes.
Such a asynchronous statement is introduced with the keyword
asynchronous:
// Both assignments in parallel, only the time of one needed!
asynchronous
a=42;
b=42;
For parallel execution, two or more statements are really executed in parallel; the program continues after the block once all those statements are finished.
This flavour of multi-threading costs a bit runtime and a few neurons, but is much more flexible and safe than asynchronous execution. Here one need not know at compile-time which of the parallel lines will be the longest.
Such a block is written after the keyword parallel in curly braces. All
statements that are directly within this block are executed in parallel.
// Three assignments of different durations in parallel
parallel
{
a=0;
b=5&6;
c=(3<<1)|(19^(5&2));
}
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