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Tiny Languages

ASM BASIC MOUSE LISP TCL APL/K PL/0

This repository contains code examples for a series of blog posts "Great Tiny Languages".

Here you may find micro-implementations of the most fundamental historical programming languages. Each implementation is in Python, code is deliberately terse to keep it under ~50 lines of code. Only Python standard library is used, and even that to a very humble extent (sys, sometimes re, rarely itertool etc).

I hope this project becomes a good starting point in implementing your own programming languages or learning about the history of programming.

Languages

  • asm.py - Assembly - compiles Python-ish assembly into bytecode and executes it.
  • basic.py - BASIC - a subset of TinyBASIC, but it comes with a proper BASIC line editor!
  • lisp.py - Lisp 1.5 - a classic, by John McCarthy, enough to interpret itself (meta-circular interpreter)
  • apl.py - a k/simple interpreter, by Arthur Whitney, toy dialect of K (array processing programming language), which is a variant of APL itself.
  • mouse.py - concatenative programming language MOUSE, as published in BYTE magazine from 1979.
  • pl0.py - a PL/0 interpreter, by Niclaus Wirth.
  • tcl.py - a tiny, Tool Command Language (Tcl) interpreter.

License

Code is distributed under MIT license. PRs are welcome!