Dysphasia

At a certain point in every programmer's life, one develops the desire to create a programming language. I am no different. This is extremely experimental, and best thought of as an art project.

Dysphasia is a simple language that compiles via LLVM.

Download

git clone https://github.com/sminnee/dysphasia.git 
cd dysphasia
npm install

On OSX, you can use Homebrew to install LLVM, which is a dependency. Note that you have to use the llvm36 package, not the llvm one.

brew install llvm36

If you install this package, then you will get llvm-config-3.6, clang++-3.6, llc-3.6 and opt-3.6 in your path. If these tools have different binary names, please set the LLVM_CONFIG, CLANG, LLC and OPT environment variables.

Try it out

It doesn't do very much right, now, but this will show a parse tree:

node main.js examples/simple.dp

This will compile to examples/simple, which you can then run:

examples/simple

Language features

Because this is in development, many basic features are missing, but this is what is implemented so far.

Function blocks

Functions are defined by writing a function name, followed by a set of statements in braces. Function names must start with a letter, and subsequent characters should be alphanumerics or _.

main {
  return 1;
}

Expressions

Basic mathematical expressions are supported, with +, -, *, /, and brackets for precedence:

12 * (2 + 4)

String expressions

Strings are double quoted:

"Hello!"

Strings can be concatenated using +. Any other type that is concatenated to a string will be casted to a string:

"I've called this" + 5 + " times!" 5 + " o'clock" "Lucky number" + 5

If/then/else

If/then/else synax is similar to C:

main {
  if(1) {
    puts("Hello world");
  } else {
    puts("Goodbye world");
  }
}

Loops

For loops will iterate on an array. You can simply provide a list, as a way of repeating a statement a number of times:

for(1..10) { puts("Show me ten times"); }

Use

The "use" statement can import a C function, such as puts. Right now it only works with functions that take a single char* argument.

use puts(string);
use print(string, ...);
main {
  puts("hello world");
  printf("I can count to %i!\n", 5);
  return 0;
}