Odo

My personal programming language. Written in C++.

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^{The README is a work in progress.}

This is my first attempt at making a usable, personalized interpreted programming language. First as in, the specs. This is the 2nd time I port this language, the first edition was written in Swift. At this point, the C++ version has become the main branch of the project.

This project is me practicing C++ in real-world, decently sized applications, and applying some knowledge about designing programming languages. Most of this techniques I learnt from Let's build a simple interpreter by Ruslan Spivak.

Considering I have very little experience in C++, this project has a lot of bugs and bad practices. But from this commit on, I'll be focusing on refactoring my code so it doesn't have as many basic mistakes.

Build

The requirements for building the project are:

• A C/C++ compiler for your system (I use clang, but gcc/g++ should work too).
• CMake installed.

When you have the requirements, building is done as follows:

• Open a terminal in the directory of the project
• mkdir a directory called build, and cd (or dir on windows.) into it.
• Run the command cmake .. and then make.
• Now you can use odo as the executable in the build directory.

Design

The main objective is having a typed interpreted language that implements features from all my favorite real languages. Many of the decisions were taking on the premise "does this convention exist because it's practical, or because of the limitations of the time that language was designed?". For example, ; at the end of statements (in Odo they're optional). Or parenthesis surrounding the conditions in if or while.

Lately I've also renamed the print function to write, since the meaning of printing has changed considerably since the time that function was originally named.

Another change done to odo's syntax was removing the double operators && and ||, and instead using the actual words they describe.

Example Code

Some example code written in odo:

> fibonacci.odo

#{ fibonacci.odo }#
int n = 45

int x = 0
int y = 0
int z = 1

forange i: n{
    writeln(i, ":", z)
    x = y
    y = z
    z = z + x
}

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> string_reversed.odo

writeln("Testing reversing a string")

string first = read()

string result = ""
foreach char ~: first {
    result += char
}

writeln(result)

Some current problems

Maybe using shared_ptr everywhere isn't the best. I'll work on this, maybe getting weak pointers here and there.

I want to make a standard library with different modules. For the moment, the native module section of odo is a little barebones.