So my previous post introduced a trivial interpreter for a TCL-like language.
In the past week or two I've cleaned it up, fixed a bunch of bugs, and added 100% test-coverage. I'm actually pretty happy with it now.
One of the reasons for starting this toy project was to experiment with how easy it is to extend the language using itself
Some things are simple, for example replacing this:
puts "3 x 4 = [expr 3 * 4]"
With this:
puts "3 x 4 = [* 3 4]"
Just means defining a function (proc) named *. Which we can do like so:
proc * {a b} {
expr $a * $b
}
(Of course we don't have lists, or variadic arguments, so this is still a bit of a toy example.)
Doing more than that is hard though without support for more primitives written in the parent language than I've implemented. The obvious thing I'm missing is a native implementation of upvalue, which is TCL primitive allowing you to affect/update variables in higher-scopes. Without that you can't write things as nicely as you would like, and have to fall back to horrid hacks or be unable to do things.
# define a procedure to run a body N times
proc repeat {n body} {
set res ""
while {> $n 0} {
decr n
set res [$body]
}
$res
}
# test it out
set foo 12
repeat 5 { incr foo }
# foo is now 17 (i.e. 12 + 5)
A similar story implementing the loop word, which should allow you to set the contents of a variable and run a body a number of times:
proc loop {var min max bdy} {
// result
set res ""
// set the variable. Horrid.
// We miss upvalue here.
eval "set $var [set min]"
// Run the test
while {<= [set "$$var"] $max } {
set res [$bdy]
// This is a bit horrid
// We miss upvalue here, and not for the first time.
eval {incr "$var"}
}
// return the last result
$res
}
loop cur 0 10 { puts "current iteration $cur ($min->$max)" }
# output is:
# => current iteration 0 (0-10)
# => current iteration 1 (0-10)
# ...
That said I did have fun writing some simple test-cases, and implementing assert, assert_equal, etc.
In conclusion I think the number of required primitives needed to implement your own control-flow, and run-time behaviour, is a bit higher than I'd like. Writing switch, repeat, while, and similar primitives inside TCL is harder than creating those same things in FORTH, for example.