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calmyourtities
5y

The Open Standard For Cross-Language Syntaxis

Project Type
Open source idea
Summary

The Open Standard For Cross-Language Syntaxis

Description
A project to translate code - code can be written in any language and translated to another. I can write a syntax definition for any two languages, and they will be able to translate from one to another. Eg. I can write a syntax definition such as: var [var_name] [type]; [var_name] = [value]; if( [BOOLEAN_EXPR] ) { [CODE_BLOCK] } and another syntax definition: [type] [var_name] [var_name] : [value] if [BOOLEAN_EXPR]: [INDENT_CODE_BLOCK] then with my definitions, I could write code in the first definition: var myVariable int myVariable = 1 if ( myVariable > 0 ) { print("greater than 0!"); } and translate that code into the syntax of the second definition: int myVariable myVariable : 1 if myVariable > 0: print("hi") The goal of this project is to allow people the freedom of syntax and defining how they want to program a language.
Tech Stack
any for the interpreter
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Comments
  • 0
    5y
    FYI the end goal is plugins for IDEs, and maybe a small website with popular language syntaxis
  • 1
    5y
    where do i sign qwq
  • 5
    5y
    Will you support brainfuck and jsfuck?
  • 1
    5y
    @alexbrooklyn if you write your own syntax definition!
  • 5
    5y
    Take a look at "Backus–Naur form". It's pretty much the standard for this kind of thing.

    Nice syntax too.

    Also the extended version (eBNF) is even nicer to work with.
  • 1
    5y
    There is already something like that. Thrift.
  • 1
    5y
    @ewpratten that's just a syntax right? is it used to change the syntax of code?
  • 0
    5y
    @-ANGRY-CLIENT- looks ok but not ideal.
  • 5
    5y
    @calmyourtities but it can model anything (including be human languages)

    So all you would need to do is build your program to accept two .bnf files for two languages and an input, instead of defining your own standard.
  • 1
    5y
    @calmyourtities so how would this work? You make an AST from an input and language description (I second @ewpratten's suggestion, BNF is pretty much the way to go for grammar definitions) and compile that AST back into code using some other language definition?
  • 0
    5y
    @RememberMe ast?
  • 1
    5y
    @calmyourtities abstract syntax tree
    Basically an abstract representation of the structure of your program in terms of nodes, which frees the thing from the structure of written syntax.

    Eg. For 5 * (2 + 3)
    I'd have a multiply-node at the root of the tree, inside which (i.e. children of which) are a value-node with the value 5 and an add-node, inside which are two value-nodes for 2 and 3.

    The introductory example on the Wikipedia page is pretty nice
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
  • 1
    5y
    @calmyourtities

    If I was writing the same expression in lisp with its different syntax, eg. (* 5 (+ 2 3)) (operator-operand-operand instead of the usual operand-operator-operand) I just have to change my parser, the AST built stays the same so you can use a common set of tools to process it. A similar idea (intermediate representation) is what allows LLVM to compile so many languages using a common framework.
  • 2
    5y
    @RememberMe ast is a great suggestion.
  • 0
    5y
    The hard parts for this would be the standard libraries, and languages which just operate differently, e.g. Js (or actually Node) being single-threaded with async i/o which is tricky to translate to another language.
  • 0
    5y
    If you're not prepared to design the most epic and complex layers of abstraction that's not gonna be a whole lot of fun. Not the syntax part but the semantics
  • 0
    5y
    I really like the idea. But have a look at the complexity of LLVM which does a much simpler sourcecode->ir->machinecode translation rather than sourcecode->ir->sourcecode. I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I really like the idea. It's just a lot of complexity
  • 0
    5y
    Visual programming is understatement in its current position. Better work on it instead of making another syntax.
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