Didn’t I just do one of these? Well, yes. Yes I did. But I love building compilers and interpreters, so when I saw this one was in beta (and thus free 😉), I had to try it!

It’s directly an implemention of the Lox languages from the Crafting Interpreters website / book (my review), if incomplete. By the end of the lesson, we’ll have:

• A tokenizer that handles parentheses, braces, operators (single and multiple character), whitespace, identifiers, string literals, numeric literals, and keywords
• A parser that can take those tokens and build an abstract syntax tree using recursive descent parsing
• A simple tree walking interpreter for some subset of the language

It doesn’t handle all of the syntax (yet). In particular, we don’t have functions, control statements like if or while or custom classes. These seem… kind of important! But it’s a start and something I can definitely see myself building more on it.

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Two posts in two days? Madness!

But really, it got a bit late yesterday so I figured I’d split this into two different posts.

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Let’s continue StackLang Part VII: New CLI and Datatypes and implement lists stacks in the compiler!

In this post:

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Another day, another Stacklang!

Today, we’ve got two main parts to work on:

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We’ve gone through all sorts of things building up the StackLang language so far:

But what can we actually do with it?

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It’s been a bit, but I hope it’s worth it. StackLang, part 5: compiling to C!

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StackLang, part 4: an interpreter. Here we go again!

This time, the goal is to actually get code running

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StackLang, part 3: parsing. This is going to be the most complicated one thus far! Onward.

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StackLang, part 2: lexing.

It’s quite often the simplest part of implementing a programming language (although parsers for s-expression based languages come close), but it’s still something that needs done. So here we go!

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I enjoy writing programming languages. Example: Tiny. Let’s do that again.

This time, StackLang:

{
  @[n fact]
  1
  { n 1 - $fact fact n * }
  N 1 <= if
} @fact

5 $fact fact writeln

Bit of gibberish there, I suppose, but the goal is to write everything in a postfix/stack based model. So n 1 - $fact fact n * is equivalent to fact(fact, n - 1) * n in a more traditional language.

Over the next few posts, I hope to write up where I am thus far and what’s next.

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