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NAPL Programming Language Wiki

NAPL (Not Another Programming Language) is a programming language built purely for fun and educational purposes.

NAPL Wiki provides the language definitions to illustrate the NAPL language.

• Hello World - A hello world example.
• Primitives - Learn about string, numbers and other primitives.
• Variable Bindings - Mutable bindings.
• Expressions
• Flow of Control - if/else, for, and others.
• Functions - Learn about Methods and High Order Functions.
• Standard Library - Helper methods included as standard.

Why?

I decided I wanted to educate myself to learn the constructs of a programming language and to challenge myself. Initially I will develop the compiler in Go and my current thought process is to transpile NAPL into Go.

Language Specification

Must Have:

• Comments // or /* */
• Statically typed variables, however, type can be inferred. var name: string = "This is NAPL"; or var name = "This is NAPL";
• Data types: string, number, boolean, null
• Variables can be defined as arrays. var digits: number[] = [1, 2, 3];
• (maybe) Tuples - Defined as return (1, "string");
• Variables are by default immutable, add the keyword mut to make a variable mutable. var mut name = "name";
• Precedence and grouping var average = (min + max) / 2;
• A basic standard library containing print() and clock().
• Control Flow: if/else statements, while loop, for loop
• Functions

Must Be Able To:

• Bootstrap - bootstrapping is the technique for producing a self-compiling compiler.