Onward

28 May 2013

This post was imported from blogspot.

After much soul-searching... actually, not that much... I've decided to continue working on Loyc and EC# even though I discovered a really nice language in Nemerle. Personally, I wouldn't mind switching development to Nemerle, but I didn't want to throw away all the work I'd already done on LLLPG, and I still think that the goals of the Loyc project cover a lot of ground that Nemerle is not intended to cover, so continuing to work on Loyc is not simply a waste of time.

Nemerle has a great macro system, and I have a lot to learn about how it works. Whatever I learn, I will document it and apply that knowledge to EC#. Assuming I'm smart enough to decipher how it works, EC# will end up with a great macro system like Nemerle's.

Loyc development will continue in C#, since (A) there is so much C# code already; (B) I'm going to write a EC# compiler and it should be self-hosting, which is impossible if I introduce Nemerle code; and (C) I want to attract new developers, and requiring them to use a new programming language might drive them away.

I wrote a big long blog post about LLLPG and a new syntax I'm developing called LES, but just as I was about to post it I discovered a serious design flaw in LES. I'll see if I can iron that out before the post... by which time LLLPG will be almost done! I just got simple syntactic predicates working this morning, so all that is left is the parser which will finally allow you to easily give LLLPG an input grammar.