Re: Formally Defining a Programming Language

On Nov 19, 2:45 pm, Seima Rao <seima...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> n designing my own Programming Language and given the existence
> of a lot of programming languages and an infinity of "knowhows" that
> is the Internet, I resorted to adhoc adaptation methods that worked
> incredibly well!


I'd like to share a few thoughts here, based on my experience with XL
(http://xlr.sf.net):


- Don't design a language today based on 30-years-old templates. XL
demonstrates that you can create a working, readable language with
user-extensible syntax using a recursive descent parser which is less
than 2000 lines of commented C++.


- Keep it simple. The C++ specification weights hundreds of pages, and
it's full of bugs and ambiguities. XL can be explained in twenty pages
or so, see http://xlr.sourceforge.net/sites/default/files/XLRef.pdf.


- Consider its applications, the ecosystem. Think about the library,
about meta-programming, about domain-specific languages, about IDE
integration (Eclipse, vi or emacs).




> Can readers of this forum help direct to relevant materials wrt
> Formalism that I can study to learn about Formalisms that will help in
> deciding about my Programming Language?


I assume you know about the Dragon Book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Dragon_Book)?

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