My Current Language Project

I was thinking about redoing my website in anticipation of a game I may or may not be making. None of the languages or frameworks out there at the moment really speak to me, though. I've been reading about Factor lately, and I think it's a superb language. I thought about using it, but there were some things I wanted to add, and some things about its philosophy that I didn't agree with. So I decided to make yet another language for web development.

The code-name of the project is Very, because for some reason I've been fond of naming my projects adverbs lately. It's a dynamically typed, concatenative, lazy language with homoiconic syntax, closely related to Forth and Lisp.

Very has very few builtins: the core special forms include only a few stack combinators (dup, pop, swap, quote, apply, compose) and some operations for introducing definitions. Fewer stack combinators are of course possible, but these represent a good balance of minimalism and efficiency. It's the definition special forms that are particularly interesting.

The def special form is nothing special: it creates a word by binding a name to a quotation that is applied when the word is invoked. This gives you general recursive functions. The extern special form gives you the ability to invoke functions through the C FFI, which is how many secondary builtins are defined.

The token special form is more subtle. By default, only parentheses, quoted strings, and whitespace-delimited identifiers (which include numbers) are recognised by the tokeniser. token modifies the lexer to treat a particular sequence of characters as a single token regardless of any adjacent nonwhitespace characters. This allows a program to introduce new special tokens as it is being read.

The macro special form is where things get really interesting. Macros are words that operate on a stack of terms that have been read since the point of invocation of the macro, allowing them to perform arbitrary operations on the source. Macros have access to the full power of the language, and may do anything that ordinary words can.

In addition, macros have the ability to manipulate the queue of terms that have yet to be read, meaning they are not restricted to the usual postfix syntax. Macros can invoke other words, including macros, directly at compile-time or indirectly through macro expansion.

The macro system will be used to provide high-level, user-friendly syntactic forms that correspond directly to efficient underlying operations, so those used to a more traditional infix imperative syntax will have no trouble, but those interested in working closer to the philosophy of the language are still encouraged to do so.

At the moment, I've got most of the basics in place, and am currently working on macros. I'm sure there will be plenty of examples to show off as I get more done. Until then.