Designing a new language...

daredevil14

Hello there... I am really interested in the answer of this question :

How can i design, develop and implement a programming language ?

I mean i want to start from scratch... don't i have to program a language by another language ?...

Any quick overview would be appreciated, thanks 🙂

dougal85

PHP is coded in C - why not download the source code and have a look?

NogDog

LEX and YACC are popular tools for creating compilers.

Weedpacket

daredevil14 wrote:
I mean i want to start from scratch... don't i have to program a language by another language ?...

Not if you want to flip each bit in memory by hand.

http://web.cs.mun.ca/~ulf/pld/
http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/pcinfo/progdocs/plbook/
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Main_Page

halojoy

daredevil14 wrote:
How can i design, develop and implement a programming language ?
I mean i want to start from scratch...
don't i have to program a language by another language ?...

Great!
I want to use your programming language.
Give me some link to your project, please.
When you think I can download and install first beta release?

I run Windows XP.
A windows setup.exe would be nice.
Thanks 🙂

A few notes by halojoy:
----------------

Some language might be constructed. Intended to be lang.

Other just happen. PHP was not language from start. Think was a Perl program ?

There are many programming languages, and most are hardly used at all.

Some very good languages have difficulty to become popular.

The main language most used and refered to is C (with variants like C+ C++).

Currently, common programming languages for web related are:
HTML(with variants like XHTML), JAVA(with variants like Ajax), PHP, ASP

Almost anything human made, comes out of some practical need.

----------------

We have saying in my country:

🙂 OUR NEED - is the mother of All Inventions 🙂 <<<

regars
halojoy

rulian

I'd say we community develop one right here right now

Let's call it "Kitty"
It's starts with

<kitty> 
  <meow> Hello World</meow>
</kitty>

Output: Hello World

Hehe, I like that.......

bpat1434

I could have sworn we here started the b0rked language.... a fork of PHP.... where did that thread go?

Elizabeth

bpat1434 wrote:
I could have sworn we here started the b0rked language.... a fork of PHP.... where did that thread go?

You mean this one?

bpat1434

No, the one where we try to make the code as confusing as possible...

dougal85

halojoy wrote:
JAVA(with variants like Ajax)

Java and Ajax have almost nothing in common. Ajax uses JavaScript, not Java. PHP is closer to Java than JavaScript is...

halojoy

thanks, douglas
so now we know ajax is more javascript than java

for me anything java is java .. this is how my language works
it is a semantic question as well as a techniqal language terms question
.. and all boils down to each and everyone's personal defintion of terms & words.

This has to do with how associations works in every single brain.
Letters, charaters and words are only symbols, tokens.

There is many times no 100% good definition of word.
A single defintion that covers all that a word can mean to eveyone reader.

I am glad to see most other readers here, understood my post
... otherwise I would surely 😃 have had a lot of comments. Pointing out 😃 this and that detail.

Some can not even get the overall main message,
because they hang up on words. words that are only tools to convey a message.
This is what separates A GOOD READER from those that can not READ RIGHT.
There is an english nice experssion: Read Me Right, please.
The Message is More than words. Words are more than Chars.

But Understanding is Most Of All. Between people.
Misunderstanding is the root of much evil ... even Wars.

This is right on topic of Languages 🙂

For me and most not professional programmers java and javascript is about the same
... maybe until today
But anyway, i do not care too much
java is not something i want to use, more than necessary,
for my pages to work

sometimes java (or script of java) can do what html and php have difficult to do

there have been some blog article, i read
saying that too much java slows down your html page
i think this may be true

any interpretator that code has got to pass will consume clockcycles
modern very fast processors/connections may hide this fact,

so we do not have to notice or even bother

There are 2-3 extremes in programming:
1. for minimal memory occupation = small space
2. for minimal clock cycles = fast
3. some middle way, a compromise between 1 & 2

Back when we started programming totol RAM could be 8 / 16 kBytes. (8192, 16384 bytes).
My first Sinclair Z80 8bit computer had RAM modules 8K, if I remember.
Those days programming in BASIC or better with Z80 compiler directly to machine code instructions,
programming for minimal space was certainly an issue.

CPU was much much slower than today. Think like 4-10 MHz for the Z80.

Today,
we see a lot sloopy coding and programming,
because there is no real need bother with
1. minimal space ... now we have 1.024.000.000 kB RAM, at least ( 1 Giga )
2. minimal clock cycles .... now we have normal CPU with several 1.000 MHz
... and SATA Drives that are very fast.

halojoy

laserlight

for me anything java is java .. this is how my language works
it is a semantic question as well as a techniqal language terms question
.. and all boils down to each and everyone's personal defintion of terms & words.

You need to change how your language works then. Would you also claim that C is C++ which is C#, since they all have 'C' in their names? I hope not, as it is quite clear that despite the similiarity of names partially due to the ancestry of these programming languages (which also results in some similiarity of syntax), they are different programming languages.

You could, of course, define /Java./i as Java, and define /C./i as C, but then I could define PHP as Oz and SQL as Prolog then talk about how phpBB is written in Oz and is commonly used with relational database systems that use Prolog as the query language. It would just be confusing and lead to misunderstanding. As you pointed out, "Misunderstanding is the root of much evil ... even Wars."

So get it straight: Java and Javascript are different languages. "Script of Java" is not Javascript, and it might even refer to JSP, but either way that name is not well defined.

NogDog

http://kb.mozillazine.org/JavaScript_is_not_Java
http://www.ericgiguere.com/articles/javascript-is-not-java.html

Weedpacket

halojoy wrote:
.. and all boils down to each and everyone's personal defintion of terms & words.

No it doesn't. There's this thing called "communication", you see, and it relies on people agreeing on various protocols and definitions. And when you start getting into technical discussions, then there are 100% fixed definitions - often for very good reasons (like, otherwise people will die).

I don't know why I feel this is an appropriate place to vomit forth the following chunk of JavaScript:

var head = function(xl){
	if(xl.length==0) throw "Empty list";
	return xl[0];
}
var tail = function(xl){
	if(xl.length==0) throw "Empty list";
	return xl.slice(1);
}
var cat = function(xl){return function(yl){
	return xl.concat(yl);
}}
var cons = function(x){
	return cat([x]);
}



var foldr = function(f){return function(z){return function(xl){
	if(xl.length==0) return z;
	return f(head(xl))(foldr(f)(z)(tail(xl)));
}}}

var filter = function(p){return function(xl){
	if(xl.length==0) return [];
	var x = head(xl);
	var xs = filter(p)(tail(xl));
	if(p(x))
		return cons(x)(xs);
	else
		return xs;
}}

/*
var take = function(n){return function(xl){
	if(n==0) return [];
	if(xl.length==0) return [];
	return cons(head(xl))(take(n-1)(tail(xl)));
}}

var drop = function(n){return function(xl){
	if(n==0) return xl;
	if(xl.length==0) return [];
	return drop(n-1)(tail(xl));
}}
*/

var splitAt = function(n){return function(xl){
	if(n==0) return [[],xl];
	if(xl.length==0) return [[],[]];
	var xx = splitAt(n-1)(tail(xl));
	return [cons(head(xl))(xx[0]), xx[1]];
}}

/*
var merge_sort = function(xl){
	var n = xl.length;
	if(n<=1) return xl;
	var us = merge_sort(take(n>>1)(xl));
	var vs = merge_sort(drop(n>>1)(xl));

var merge = function(xl){return function(yl){
	if(xl.length==0) return yl;
	if(yl.length==0) return xl;
	var x = head(xl);
	var y = head(yl);
	if(x<=y)
		return cons(x)(merge(tail(xl))(yl));
	else
		return cons(y)(merge(xl)(tail(yl)));
}}

return merge(us)(vs);
}
*/

var merge_sort = function(xl){
	var n = xl.length;
	if(n<=1) return xl;
	var uv = splitAt(n>>1)(xl);
	var us = merge_sort(uv[0]);
	var vs = merge_sort(uv[1]);

var merge = function(xl){return function(yl){
	if(xl.length==0) return yl;
	if(yl.length==0) return xl;
	var x = head(xl);
	var y = head(yl);
	if(x<=y)
		return cons(x)(merge(tail(xl))(yl));
	else
		return cons(y)(merge(xl)(tail(yl)));
}}

return merge(us)(vs);
}


var insertion_sort = (function(){
	var insert = function(x){return function(yl){
		if(yl.length==0) return [x];
		var y = head(yl);
		if(x<=y)
			return cons(x)(yl);
		else
			return cons(y)(insert(x)(tail(yl)));
	}}
	return foldr(insert)([]);
})();


var quicksort = function(xl){
	if(xl.length==0) return [];
	var x = head(xl);
	var f1 = function(u){
		return u>=x;
	}
	var f2 = function(u){
		return !f1(u);
	}
	var xs = tail(xl);
	var us = quicksort(filter(f2)(xs));
	var vs = quicksort(filter(f1)(xs));
	return cat(us)(cons(x)(vs));
}

quicksort([4,3,2,1,67,5,3,9,5,3]);

Oh, yes. Write THAT in Java!

There's glory for you!

Weedpacket

bpat1434 wrote:
No, the one where we try to make the code as confusing as possible...

You might be thinking of http://phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10234388

dougal85

Weedpacket, did you put commented out functions in that JavaScript to throw us off?

Weedpacket

It wouldn't have worked if the JavaScript had been syntax-highlighted 🙂 But really it's because there were two implementations and I couldn't be bothered taking the other one out (I didn't even need to comment it, really).

I've been trying to put together a wee library of "useful higher order functions" and this was a throwaway test script I'd had sitting in an editor window at the time. Maybe at some point I'll tidy it up, namespace it, and have something someone else might want to use. But I have to get a better grip on lazy evaluation so's I can handle infinitely long lists first:

var iterate = function(f){return function(x){
return cons(x)(iterate(f)(f(x)));
}}

isn't really kosher.