Entries posted in July 2022

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.

Tags: github, golang, tcl | No comments

Recently I've been working with simple/trivial scripting languages, and I guess I finally reached a point where I thought "Lisp? Why not". One of the reasons for recent experimentation was thinking about the kind of minimalism that makes implementing a language less work - being able to actually use the language to write itself.

FORTH is my recurring example, because implementing it mostly means writing a virtual machine which consists of memory ("cells") along with a pair of stacks, and some primitives for operating upon them. Once you have that groundwork in place you can layer the higher-level constructs (such as "for", "if", etc).

Lisp allows a similar approach, albeit with slightly fewer low-level details required, and far less tortuous thinking. Lisp always feels higher-level to me anyway, given the explicit data-types ("list", "string", "number", etc).

Here's something that works in my toy lisp:

;; Define a function, `fact`, to calculate factorials (recursively).
(define fact (lambda (n)
  (if (<= n 1)
    1
      (* n (fact (- n 1))))))

;; Invoke the factorial function, using apply
(apply (list 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)
  (lambda (x)
    (print "%s! => %s" x (fact x))))

The core language doesn't have helpful functions to filter lists, or build up lists by applying a specified function to each member of a list, but adding them is trivial using the standard car, cdr, and simple recursion. That means you end up writing lots of small functions like this:

(define zero? (lambda (n) (if (= n 0) #t #f)))
(define even? (lambda (n) (if (zero? (% n 2)) #t #f)))
(define odd?  (lambda (n) (! (even? n))))
(define sq    (lambda (x) (* x x)))

Once you have them you can use them in a way that feels simple and natural:

(print "Even numbers from 0-10: %s"
  (filter (nat 11) (lambda (x) (even? x))))

(print "Squared numbers from 0-10: %s"
  (map (nat 11) (lambda (x) (sq x))))

This all feels very sexy and simple, because the implementations of map, apply, filter are all written using the lisp - and they're easy to write.

Lisp takes things further than some other "basic" languages because of the (infamous) support for Macros. But even without them writing new useful functions is pretty simple. Where things struggle? I guess I don't actually have a history of using lisp to actually solve problems - although it's great for configuring my editor..

Anyway I guess the journey continues. Having looked at the obvious "minimal core" languages I need to go further afield:

• Simple TCL-like scripting language.
• Simple FORTH-like scripting language.
• Yet another Lisp, in golang.

I'll make an attempt to look at some of the esoteric programming languages, and see if any of those are fun to experiment with.

Tags: github, lisp | 2 comments