On Wednesday, 20 January 2016 at 10:04:03 UTC, burjui wrote:
That's alright. Parsing and AST construction are trivial with S-expressions (Lisp-like syntax), so if you use them for the early stages of development, you can focus on the type system. When you're done with types, you can switch to making a better grammar for your language.
True. I'd been playing with the idea of having multiple syntactic "front-ends" anyway (mainly for the purpose of making DSLs), so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to use an S-expression syntax. One problem, though, is that I'd either have to extend that syntax to support some of the constructs I want (i.e array literals) or create a bunch of variadic constructor functions (which could be evaluated at compile time). Of course, S-expression syntax is kind of designed to be extensible...
That's all off-topic, though. ;)
