eighty-twenty

I’ve been hesitant to make my code publicly available, since it’s embarrassingly messy, but a couple of people have indicated they’re interested in taking a closer look, so here it is:

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/tonyg/smalltalk-tng

The code is mostly written using Chicken (with my chicken-sdl bindings and a version of my packrat parsing library), and is laid out as follows:

./doc

Contains notes on design and implementation, mostly fairly out-of-date, but containing the odd interesting thought. There are also some discarded experiments in concrete syntax here.

./experiments

Contains syntax experiments, and some spike-solutions exploring ideas I'm considering for inclusion, such as STM and partial evaluation.

./lib

Contains third-party library code: at the moment, just a patched version of Dorai Sitaram's pregexp library.

./r1

A first ThiNG spike implementation, borrowing ideas heavily from Slate. The dispatch algorithm is a Scheme reimplementation of Slate's original common-lisp dispatch algorithm (the code is structurally almost identical). The main difference between the two languages is that the only available mutable state is through MVars, and that every subexpression is evaluated in parallel. Have a look at boot.thing to get a feel for the language. (Note in particular the differences between #map: and #mapInOrder:.)

This implementation got as far as having image-based persistence, network I/O, a socket-based REPL, and an interface to the SDL graphics output and UI event input frameworks before I decided I'd learnt enough from it and moved on to the next iteration.

./r2

This was a small step on the way to r3.

./r3

This is the spike I'm currently working on (that I mentioned the other day). At the moment, it's a parser and a simple evaluator. Both are broken right this minute, as I'm working on some quite fundamental changes to the syntax of the language.