PCASTL
Paradigm | imperative, reflective |
---|---|
Designed by | Philippe Choquette |
Developer | Philippe Choquette |
First appeared | 2008 |
Stable release | 3.5 / March 31, 2018 |
OS | Cross-platform |
License | GNU Lesser General Public License |
Website | www |
Influenced by | |
C, R |
The PCASTL (an acronym for by Parent and Childset Accessible Syntax Tree Language) is an interpreted high-level programming language. It was created in 2008 by Philippe Choquette.[1] The PCASTL is designed to ease the writing of self-modifying code. The language has reserved words parent and childset to access the nodes of the syntax tree of the currently written code.[2]
Hello world
[edit]The "Hello world program" is quite simple:
"Hello, world!"
or
print("Hello, world!")
will do the same.
Syntax
[edit]The syntax of PCASTL is derived from programming languages C and R. The source of R version 2.5.1 has been studied to write the grammar and the lexer used in the PCASTL interpreter.
Influences
[edit]Like in R, statements can, but do not have to, be separated by semicolons.[3] Like in R, a variable can change type in a session. Like in C and R, PCASTL uses balanced brackets ({ and }) to make blocks.
Operators found in PCASTL have the same precedence and associativity as their counterparts in C.[2][4] for loops are defined like in C. ++
and --
operators are used like in C to increment or decrement a variable before or after it is used in its expression.
An example of PCASTL using the for reserved word and the ++
operator:
for (i = 1; i < 4; i++) print(i)
Functions and comments in PCASTL are defined like in R:
# function definition (comment) a = function() { print("Hello, world!") } # function call a()
parent and childset reserved words
[edit]Those reserved words can only be written lowercase and will not be recognized otherwise. The parent reserved word gives a reference to the parent node in the syntax tree of the code where the word is placed. In the following code, the parent node is the operator =
.
a = parent
The variable "a" will hold a reference to the =
node. The following code shows how to get references to the two child nodes of the operator =
with the childset reserved word.
a.childset[0] a.childset[1]
To display the value of "a", some ways are given in this example:
a a.childset[0].parent a.childset[1].parent a.childset[0].parent.childset[0].parent # and so on...
In the following code: we assign a code segment to the right child of the =
node, we execute the =
node a second time and we call the newly defined function.
a.childset[1] = `function() print("hello")' execute(a) a()
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ "pcosmos.ca". Philippe Choquette. Retrieved 2008-06-14.
- ^ a b "PCASTL: by Parent and Childset Accessible Syntax Tree Language". Philippe Choquette. Retrieved 2008-06-14.
- ^ "An Introduction to R". R Development Core Team. Retrieved 2008-06-14.
- ^ Hanly, Jeri R.; Elliot B. Koffman (1999). Problem Solving & Program Design in C, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-35748-8.