When you're trying to find a bug in your parser/interpreter but it's working fine and all this time the bug was in the code you were feeding to the parser/interpreter. Smh

!rant
...so I started learning F#... again, second attempt, first one failed like 3 years ago because I had no real usecase appropriate for the language, so I didn't get it.

...but now i'm trying to make my own language, meaning also (wanting) parser/interpreter/compiler, and I found a lecture where dude shows off THREE he wrote (within 24 hours) for three different languages...

...and it showed me that doing my parser/interpreter/compiler in F#, using pattern matching, is going to be incredibly awesome, as opposed to doing it as string parsing in C#...

the one that exists (c#) seems underused compared to where it could (or even should) be used. and the place that uses it the most (enterprise) butchers and mangles its use, just as enterprise tends to do with everything.

the one that i'm designing... the fact that it doesn't exist yet, and that even as i'm zeroing in on syntax and philosophy that i'm very much starting to be proud of, i still don't have a proper idea of how to implement even the most basic parser/interpreter for it, not because it's in any way difficult or unusual, but just because... i've never done that before, so i get into weird circular thought paths that produce weird nonsensical code...

... on top of that, i still only have a very, very fuzzy idea of how will it (sometime in extremely distant future) actually implement the most interesting and core feature - event-based continuous (partial) re-parsing of the source code and the fact that traversing the tokens at the leaf level of the syntax tree should result in valid machine code (or at least assembly) that is the "compiled" program.

i *know* it's possible, i just don't yet know enough to have a contrete idea how exactly to achieve it.

but imagine - a programming language where interactive programming is basically the default way of working, and basically the same as normal programming in it, except the act of parsing is also the (in-memory) compilation at the same time, so it's running directly on the hardware instead of via interpretrer/vm/any of that overhead crap.

also then kinda open-source by definition.

and then to "only" write an OS in that, and voilá! a smalltalk-like environment with non-exotic, c-family syntax and actual native performance!

ahhh... <3

* a man can dream *

so far, a pretty nice tutorial book about making a parser and interpreter, but when i saw this, my thought was "don't you fucking dare..."

...but he does. flow control via exceptions.
shame.

Coolest but probably most unnecessary feature in the dev world: A whitespace (programming language) to Java bytecode transpiler. Well I kinda started, but never finished actually due to lack of motivation to really finish it. At least the Parser and Interpreter were fully functional.