11–20 of 88 posts
I've recently discovered PEG.js [0] and prototyped a small DSL in the browser [1]. Amazing stuff! I've dealt with ANTLR [2] before, but PEG.js feels so much nicer although it may not be as powerful! [0] http://pegjs.org/ [1] http://pegjs.org/online [2] http://www.antlr.org/
Like the demo version, but doesn't lock your browser with infinite recursion, and supports Ctrl+S! PegJS is a really great/fun tool.
The author says he turned to Coursera, but doesn't mention the course(s) he took, but I'm going to guess it's the the 'Compilers' class from Stanford[0]. I've heard good things about the course and the lecturer (Alex Aiken) so I really wanted to take the course while it was being offered but was too busy last year. I hope they offer it again this year. https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers
https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/Compilers/Fal...
Another interesting thing to try (and maybe complementary as well) is building an interpreter or compiler for a language you like, trying to match the spec and feature set as closely as possible, and (hopefully) gaining more insight into the tradeoffs the language designers made when deciding why things are the way they are.
Yes, I've written tools for existing languages, and found just getting the parser right to be a challenge, be it with Emacs highlighting, flex/bison, what have you. Real languages aren't as tidy as the textbook examples.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti...
Co-designing your editor with your language allows for a better experience.
You are right in that all of this is basically undocumented in textbooks. Even their presentation on on parsing is mostly unhelpful (if you want an error tolerant incremental parser for your editor, recursive descent works very well).
> Notice how not a single variable in this code has a name. They all only have types. Pretty cool, never even thought about this being possible.
It’s not a novel idea, but Wake does it quite well. Most variable names aren’t that useful—they’re just one of many possible syntactic ways to plumb values around.
brand position def Set(position): ...
The author says he turned to Coursera, but doesn't mention the course(s) he took, but I'm going to guess it's the the 'Compilers' class from Stanford[0]. I've heard good things about the course and the lecturer (Alex Aiken) so I really wanted to take the course while it was being offered but was too busy last year. I hope they offer it again this year. https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers
If you’re thinking of writing a language in earnest, you will create something much more valuable if you start from a novel semantics, and only then come up with a syntax to express those semantics, than if you were to start from syntax. The world does not need yet another reskin of Java, but it could use new programming paradigms and new ways of solving problems. As a learning exercise, implementing a language is wo…
https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/2ocw2r/how_to_creat...
OWL aims to be a low level object-oriented language without a garbage collector (albeit with reference counting).
The best 'example' program using OWL right now is a game I made for the 48 hour game jam, Global Game Jam 2015: https://github.com/bsurmanski/ggj2015
I agree with the poster that making a programming language from scratch is a great way to explore programming. On top of that, its a great experience seeing able to implement all of those features you wish were in your favorite language (or find out why they aren't).
> Notice how not a single variable in this code has a name. They all only have types. Pretty cool, never even thought about this being possible.
It’s not a novel idea, but Wake does it quite well. Most variable names aren’t that useful—they’re just one of many possible syntactic ways to plumb values around.
FWIW I've realized that in languages that are variable centric, an anonymous naming convention is often preferable to a human name because it centers one's concerns around the algorithm. After studying the options for a while I now flip between descriptive word style and "single letter and number." So I have a lot of "x0, x1, i0, s0, a0" in my function arguments. Where it's a record type, I'm deciding between abbreviation and descriptive - which ultimately depends on how often and densely I expect the data structure to be accessed(short names imply it gets used in a dense, idiomatic style).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not a novel idea, but Wake does it quite well. Most variable names aren’t that useful—they’re just one of many possible syntactic ways to plumb values around.
The canonical example is how it's done in Forth: Ask for a number and it's already on the stack. Ask for three numbers and you push onto the stack three times. Upside: Terse code. Downside: Stack juggling can be a big maintenance burden. FWIW I've realized that in languages that are variable centric, an anonymous naming convention is often preferable to a human name because it centers one's concerns around the algori…
define do_the_thing (Foo bool -> Bar):
-> should_log;
if (should_log):
dup log_foo
foo_to_bar
if (should_log):
dup log_bar