Here it is, the first update for September. I’ve been thinking a bunch about what I want from the language and what I think I want the shape of it to be. I’ve come the following basic conclusions:

1. The syntax will gently evolve from C to Proteus. We’ll take changes a few at a time while the language starts to develop.
2. To ensure we’re building something real, I’ll be porting the code from Handmade Hero from C to Proteus¹.

So, the last language design article had this snippet:

import stdlib

let arguments = environment.arguments
guard if arguments.count != 2:
    println "Invalid usage!"; exit -1

let filename = arguments[1]
println "compiling file: {0}\n" filename
guard let file = sys.io.fopen filename sys.io.flags.read:
    println "Unable to open file."; exit -1

guard let content = sys.io.read file:
    println "Unable to read the entire file."; exit -1

println "file size: {0}" file.size
println "file contents: \n{0}" content

The more I played around with this style, I’m a bit concerned that there simply isn’t enough lexical information to make it easily scannable and parseable by humans. Also, I do wonder about the block distinction; I’ve gone back and forth on this. In one sense, I really like the significant whitespace, but on the other, I like the visual clarity of { and }; they are easier to grep while scanning quickly².

With that in mind, the following will be the focus on the syntactical changes from C in the first iteration:

1. Switch the order of type declaration
2. Stub out the import mechanism
3. Remove the ; for statement termination; it’s only used for multiple statements per line now.

Note: One other benefit of do the migrations from C to Proteus like this is the ability to convert a C file to a Proteus file (for the most part).

This means that the above sample will look like this:

import stdlib

let arguments = environment.arguments
guard if arguments.count != 2 {
    println("Invalid usage!"); exit(-1)
}

let filename = arguments[1]
println("compiling file: {0}\n", filename)
guard let file = sys.io.fopen(filename,sys.io.flags.read) {
    println("Unable to open file."); exit(-1)
}

guard let content = sys.io.read(file) {
    println("Unable to read the entire file."); exit(-1)
}

println("file size: {0}", file.size)
println("file contents: \n{0}", content)

The work items over the next couple of weeks boil down to:

1. Finish up the initial lexer (scanner and tokenizer are basically there already)
2. Start generating executable code (the first round of output will generate C code)
3. Start getting the C interop in place

Also, I’ve got a spot setup for the location of the Proteus documentation: https://owensd.io/proteus.