An interpreter for Hammer, a dynamically-typed, expression-oriented language that is somewhat functional.
Hammer is, at its core, an implementation of CLox, an imperative language with OOP features and dynamic typing, designed and implemented by Bob Nystrom for his excellent book Crafting Interpreters, which can be found at https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters, which links to a page of several other implementations just like this one! The book itself can be found at https://craftinginterpreters.com and is an excellent resource.
In addition, Hammer contains changes such as:
- Using an AST in combination with the bytecode interpreter to allow for additional optimisations and features, while simplifying both in isolation
- Makes use of Tail-Call Optimisation
- A lack of OOP features, namely classes
- Records akin to Pythons
dict, and Lists which support adding members - An extended set of builtin functions and features such as format strings/printing, custom operators, function composition, cons cells and more
- Near-completely different syntax, favouring simple operators and semantics over keywords
- A pivot towards expressions; all expression-statements return "something", loops are expressed through recursion, etc.
Hammer can be built with make using gcc, it has targets for release and debug; for a first build run:
$ make all
To guarantee the existence of the build directories.
This project is what really got me into low-level programming and comfortable with languages like C. I'd never written anything to this complexity until this project. HUGE thankyous to Bob Nystrom and the other talented programmers making and publishing their own implementations for others to see. Youre legends!