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0 pointsmjburgess1y ago0 comments

I've created many programming languages. All the ones I finished and were useful did not have grammars that "I wrote".

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do you mean https://github.com/mjburgess/Lyssa and https://github.com/mjburgess/Quazar? it's true that i can't find a grammar in either of them (https://github.com/mjburgess/Lyssa/blob/master/src/impl.py#L... seems more forthy than anything else) but (while they are very much the sort of things that i like, thank you for sharing) they also seem somewhat less like 'real-world programming languages' than things like awk, ocaml, or our other example in this thread, gcc c and objective-c until gcc replaced the bison parser with a handwritten one in 02006. that last compiler was the compiler nextstep was built on, which got steve jobs back in control of apple, to replace macos with nextstep. seems pretty real-world to me

maybe you're talking about stuff you haven't released?

mjburgessOP1y ago

Indeed, that's a defunct profile where everything should be private anyway. The reops there are 13/14 years old: these were experiments with using RPython to create languages, I'd guess when I was ~20. The point of those was to profile RPython. I have created real front-ends and compiler backends in C for non-trivial langugaes.

I will soon likely create a probabilistic programming language and compiler.

layer81y ago

Are you saying your programming languages don’t have a defined grammar?

mjburgessOP1y ago

The parser defines the grammar. This is quite common in mainstream languages -- iirc, only after some years did python get a formal description of a grammar.

layer81y ago

> The parser defines the grammar.

But how can you have assurance which grammar it defines, or that it even defines a well-defined grammar?

I’m well aware that some languages don’t bother defining a proper grammar, or define it without having a mechanism to ensure their implementation matches it, but lacking that assurance is exactly the drawback of not using a parser generator.

kragen1y ago

i was puzzled about that too and got even more puzzled when i looked at the languages i could find that he's implemented

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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kragen1y ago

maybe you're talking about stuff you haven't released?

mjburgessOP1y ago

I will soon likely create a probabilistic programming language and compiler.

layer81y ago

Are you saying your programming languages don’t have a defined grammar?

mjburgessOP1y ago

The parser defines the grammar. This is quite common in mainstream languages -- iirc, only after some years did python get a formal description of a grammar.

layer81y ago

> The parser defines the grammar.

But how can you have assurance which grammar it defines, or that it even defines a well-defined grammar?

kragen1y ago

i was puzzled about that too and got even more puzzled when i looked at the languages i could find that he's implemented

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse