willow

a (very simple) weakly-typed programming language / interpreter, built in python

a language package to provide syntax highlighting for the atom text editor is available here

usage

using python / source code

regular usage:

python willow.py source_code.wlw

passing in command-line arguments:

python willow.py source_code.wlw myarg1 myarg2

using an executable

i’ve tried to build some executables using pyinstaller - they’re located in the builds directory. they might not work on every type of processor, so, uh, good luck. however, the executables can be run WITHOUT PYTHON BEING INSTALLED ON THE SYSTEM!!

so yeah, first, add the directory containing the executable for your OS to your path, and then call like this:

willow source_code.wlw

passing in command-line arguments:

willow source_code.wlw myarg1 myarg2

examples / test functions

fun main
{
  # a simple hello world function #
  mystring = "Hello, world!";
  print mystring;
}

for a more thorough suite of test functions, check out tests/test.wlw which demonstrates some of the main features of the language

influences

while the syntax/grammar/abilities of my language are mainly dictated by what i am able to figure out how to program, some of the functionality is inspired by my experiences with ti-basic, shell scripting, javascript, and python

the VERY beginning of the language was based off of this tutorial for creating a Pascal interpreter from scratch

however, i’ve made a Lot of changes to the actual language structure, and added a LOT that wasn’t covered in the tutorial (i.e. calling functions, conditionals, loops, input/output, etc.)

variables

typing

you don’t have to declare variables as being of a certain type

myvar = 5;
myvar = "hello!";
myvar = [2,3,4];

floats, strings, and arrays are the only variable types so far.

booleans kinda exist when evaluating conditionals… 0.0 evaluates to false and non-zero evaluates to true

you can reference an uninitialized variable, it just defaults to 0.0

scope

all variables are currently global in scope, with the exception of the special variable argv (see below)

i might eventually add in local scoping for variables inside a function? maybe.

special variables

• argv - holds the arguments passed in to a function
• fileloc - holds the path to the directory of the source code currently being executed

basic arithmatic

you can add and subtract and multiply and divide!

you can also use ^ to do exponent

wow fun! it also follows order of operations yay

you can add different variable types too!

mystring = "hello";
mynum = 6;
mycombined = mystring + mynum;
print mycombined;  # should print "hello6.0" #

functions

every program needs to have a main function, that is the function that is executed by the interpreter

the main function can call other functions

it is possible to pass a value to a function, which is then accessed by the special variable argv:

fun addtwo
{
  x = argv; # argv holds what was passed in below #
  x = x + 2;
  return x;
}

fun main{
  y = 5;
  z = call(addtwo)(y);
  print z; # should print 7.0 #
}

in the main function, argv returns the command line arguments supplied when the file was interpreted

functions can call themselves, allowing recursive programming!

#recursively print the factorial#
fun factorial{
  #argv holds the arguments passed to a function#
  x = argv;
  if (x == 1)
  then {
    return x;
  }
  else {
    if (x == 0)
    then{
     return 0;
    }
    else{
      y = x-1;
      z = x * call(factorial)(y);
      return z;
    };
  };
}

fun main{
  #argv holds the arguments passed to a function.
  in this case, it's the args from command line.
  adding 0 to treat it as a float,
  since it's read in from command line as string#
  num = argv[0] + 0;
  fact = call(factorial)(num);
  print "the factorial of " + num + " is " + fact;
}

built-in functions

conditional statements:

possible through this format:

if (condition)
then
{
  #thencode#
}
else
{
  #elsecode#
};

if condition evaluates to nonzero, thencode is run, if it evaluates to zero, elsecode is run

else is optional

loops:

so far, i’ve just implemented a while loop

while (condition) then { #loopcode# };

user input:

you can prompt the user to type in something at the command line

for instance:

myname = prompt(”What is your name?”);
print “Hello, “ + myname;

file input/output:

you can read from and write to files!

myvar = “hello filesystem!”;
fileout(“myfile.txt”)(myvar);
filename = “myfile.txt”;
myresult = filein(filename);
print myresult;

the above code will write the text “hello filesystem!” to the file myfile.txt (located in the same directory as the willow script that is being interpreted), then read in the text and print it out.

you can also read from URLs using filein!

random number generation:

you can generate random floats by calling random(max_number) which will generate a float between 0 and max_number

see an example of this in action at tests/guessinggame.wlw

error handling:

willow now supports basic error handling! i’m still working on catching every possible error, but right now some of the basic errors should generate an error message with an accompanying line number reference yay!