Well, here we are. In the previous posts we laid out everything to start working on our language. For this blog I chose something of my own design, called ASPL. It stands for “Attila’s Simple Programming Language”. :D

To write the first (in my case third, actually) language I wanted to have something very simple to save myself a ton of headaches.

My design goals for the implementation are as follows.

I wanted to have:

• Compiled into bytecode
• Runs in a virtual machine
• Something with C-like syntax, so I will be comfortable with it along with everyone else
• A high-level scripting language
• A dynamic type system – because implementing a static type system is a huge pain and requires serious effort
• Automatic memory management via garbage collection
• An imperative language
• Comments
  • C–style: /* This is a comment */
  • C++–style: // This is also a comment
• A handful of built-in data types
  • Integer
  • Double
  • Boolean
  • String
  • Nil / Null
• Operators and expressions
  • Arithmetic
    • +
    • -
    • *
    • /
    • ++
    • –
  • Ternary
  • Comparison
    • <
    • <=
    • >
    • >=
  • Equality
    • ==
    • !=
  • Logical
    • AND: &
    • OR: |
    • NOT: !
• Operator precedence
• Statements: Statements are terminated with “;”
• Code blocks and scope: { … }
• Variables
  • Global
  • Local
• Control flow
  • If
  • While
  • For
• Functions
  • Global
  • Local
• Closures
• Object oriented
  • Classes
  • Inheritance
• A small standard library

I think this strikes a good balance between being easy to implement and usable in real–life.

Next time I will provide some details about these features.

Stay tuned. I’ll be back.