I have been working on developing a new type of programming language over the last few months. From a physiological perspective, it is interesting to try to create ones idea programming language and see what they create, what features does one add, change or remove.
ilang is still very pre-alpha-ish software, and I don’t expect anyone to jump and start using or even download and try it at this point, there are still too many things unimplemented at the moment to call it a complete language.
An overview of what is different:
- The power of anonymous. In may programming language, functions, classes and may other types are given names that can be looked up inside the type system. However in ilang, attempts to have classes and function and other basic types anonymous, or without names. The names are viewed as being useful to the programmers who are writing the programs.
- Short access to making function: a function is anything between {}. this means that to create function main, it looks like:
main = {}; - optional typing: This seems to be a new and growing trend in programming languages that are coming out now. By default the types on variables are not checked at all. This means that more than one check can be imposed on a variable. Also additional types can be easily encoded with some additional C++ code, and soon ilang code from within the language itself. The type checking can also do some other interesting things, more later.
- Built in database: This has always been a feature that I think higher level languages should include, now web browsers include localStorage for example. This feature can already take all primitive types and objects. classes and functions can not yet be encoded into the database. However the advantages having this built in as already noticeable in testing.
- Python style imports, but only at the top and no ‘as’, *. I originally made it this way, because I was annoyed when some code I was reading through would import something in the middle. One you have to find where the import was performed to figured out what is being included into the source, also if you go back to modify above the point where the import was performed then you have move the import up so that it will be available.
To come/planned/supppppper pre-alpha features:
- Access to the parse tree of files and the ability to modify the tree, changing the code that is running. There will be the typical system where it is able to access the direct parse tree in a ‘raw’ format, however I plan to experiment some and try and find some natural way to access and modify the syntax tree. In the aspect of natural modification, I have already noticed some of these properties being easily implemented as a function can easily be replaced by simply overwriting its value.
- Network distribution. I am hoping to turn this language into something that is useful when it comes to processing large amounts of data. The trend at this point has been to utilities a large number of computer and attempt to distribute tasks in a sort of map reduce framework. The plan at this point is to allowed for unstructured computation across the network where the system automatically determine if it is most effective to move a copy of the code for the computation or to move the data that the computation is working on.
This is only the first intro post. I believe that there will be more to come as the language further advances and develops.