For my last month at code school, I have decided to learn what it takes to develop a new programming language. Having been teased for my Canadian accent, I thought it appropriate to incorporate some idiomatic Canadianisms, and call my language Eh? Deciding what actual features I want to implement in my programming language is an interesting task, and I think I have narrowed it down to a couple of standard rules and a couple wacky ones:

Rules for Eh?

• blocks of code are delimited by ’:’ and ‘eh?’
• classes are declared using “A” keyword
• methods are defined using “CAN” keyword
• lowercase identifiers are local variables or method names
• capitalized identifiers are global variables
• no parens for args
• last value evaluated in return value

• everything is an object

  Steps for building an interpreted language

• This code has to be provided as input to a lexer.
• The lexer will convert that input into tokens.
• The parser will organize those tokens into a tree of nodes.
• The runtime will evaluate the nodes using ruby.

Prototype

Here is what I would like the final result to look like:

a Canadian
  with toque
  with scarf
  with broom

  can curl
    if skip:
      say "Hurry!"
    eh?
    if lead:
      pass
    eh?
    say "How social the game..."
  eh?

  can say_aboot:
    say "What's it all aboot?"
  eh?
eh?

With this vague action plan and “Create Your Own Programming Language” by Marc-Andre Cournoyer in hand, off we go!

Awesome