46 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
# *ghun* Programming Language
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## What is *ghun*?
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*ghun* is an esoteric programming language that is trying way too hard to be a serious programming language.
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'ghun' (pronounced like "hu-oon" with the hu being in the back of the throat like in 'chutzpa') is a verb in Klingon which means "program", in the context of "to program a computer".
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It is inspired by both [esoteric programming languages](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language), like [var'aq](https://web.archive.org/web/20091026213516/http://geocities.com/connorbd/varaq/), [uiua](https://www.uiua.org/), and [ZOMBIE](https://web.archive.org/web/20201125123312/https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/zombie.html) and serious programming languages like C, Perl, Common Lisp, Lua, Rust, Go, Odin, Zig, Elixir, and Haskell.
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## What are the features in *ghun*?
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In general the paradigms are designed to be: var'aq-like, Interpreted, JIT, Distributed, Concurrent
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See the [SPECIFICATION](./SPECIFICATION.MD) document for more info.
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## What is the purpose of this language?
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For the most part though, most modern languages are pretty much the same syntactically, they just differ for their paradigms and use case. This makes them a super dry and not very fun to program in.
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Conversely we have esolangs which are fun, but usually useless (e.g. turing tarpits) or not implemented in a way that you are able to seriously program projects in it.
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Most serious languages do not take the time to think outside the box, or add elements to make the language look good or be fun to program in.
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There are of course some exceptions to this. like in Odin you can use emoji as variables, but that is uncommon.
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All of the others were esoteric languages or languages designed to be used for games (e.g. golfing languages, video game specific languages such as TIS100, and the like).
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Lets get back on track though as to why *this* language.
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As far as my personal goals go they are:
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1. I wanted to learn about compiler design and create one
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2. Mess around with some old, obscure, or just plain weird language design ideas
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3. Combine these ideas into a language that would be both fun and able to be used for real projects; probably more along the lines of scripting, or small scale programs, but real projects nonetheless
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4. Take all the things I liked from some languages and throw them together to see what happens
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The language goals are:
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1. make the language fun to program in.
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2. make it simple to learn (the english interpreter at least)
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3. maximize code logic density, i.e. a small amount of code should represent a complex amount of logic
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4. portability/embedability, i.e. should be easy to port/embed into new hardware and implement with software. I wanted it to be very Lua This is why I went with a Interpreted-JIT style over compiled.
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5. follow the design from var'aq, but in a more "c to zig" kind of way than a "c to c++" kind of way.
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The idea is using an iterative process, that being as I find new programming projects to do; the language will inevitably fail to be able to handle that project and so I will have to add new functionality to *ghun* to handle it.
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