PieLang

For no reason whatsoever I feel like writing my own programming language. Lots of interesting times await me it seems ...

Hello world!

A simple class that just has a "Hello world!" method writing to the console:

with Greeting
	define HelloWorld as
		"Hello world!" >

This is how it would be invoked inside of a PieLang program:

Greeting -> say
say HelloWorld

Introduction

So recently I tweeted out this blog post to one of the people I follow on Twitter: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/sasha/2010/10/06/writing-a-compiler-in-c-lexical-analysis/. I realised that it's been sat in my bookmarks for while a while, and it's probably about time to do something about it. Obviously if I wanted to write my own language quickly I would use the suggested framework of Flex or something similar. However I am feeling brave today and that means I'll be creating the language from scratch as a compiled language using Roslyn and C# to the compilation part. However as things progress I might drop down to using Reflection.Emit and do the raw IL myself.

Language Specification in Backus–Naur Form

statment ::= with-statment | define-as-statement

with-statement ::= with expr

define-as-statement ::= define expr as expr

var ::= identifier

identifier ::= (letter)*

letter ::= A | B | … | Z | a | b | … | z

digit ::= 0 | 1 | … | 9