lartu / ldpl Goto Github PK

COBOL-like programming language that compiles to C++. With serious dinosaurs with neckties and briefcases 🦕💼

License: Apache License 2.0

C++ 95.52% Makefile 1.19% C 2.28% Dockerfile 0.04% CMake 0.73% Shell 0.23%

ldpl programming-language compiler cobol compiled dinosaur dinosaurs imperative-programming imperative-programming-language robust

ldpl's Introduction

LDPL is a powerful, general-purpose compiled programming language designed from the ground up to be excessively expressive, readable, fast and easy to learn. It mimics plain English, in the likeness of the good parts of older programming languages like COBOL. It even supports UTF-8 out of the box.

LDPL 5 is now considered complete and in minimal evolution mode. This means that language is supported, but its specification will intentionally be kept as unchanged as possible.

Feature requests for LDPL 6 are welcome in the LDPL Telegram Group. We are still compiling a roadmap document for the next version and your input can help to make LDPL even better than it already is.

This repository contains the source code and releases of the LDPL compiler.

Example Code

# Hello There Example
data: 
  name is text
  i is number
  
procedure: 
  display "Hello there, what's your name?"
  accept name
  for i from 0 to 10 step 1 do
    display "你好, " name "!" crlf
  repeat

This code greets the user and asks them to enter their name, then it greets them in Chinese, ten times. Easy as pie and super legible. Check the official website for more examples, including a Brainf*ck interpreter and Bellman-Ford's Algorithm!

LDPL Philosophy

LDPL is a language designed to be easy to understand and learn, and simple to write and use. We believe that coding should be like that. Compiling code should be effortless and straightforward: a single, flagless command should be enough to compile any source. Every statement in the language should do one and only one thing, not depending on the context. The compiler should deal with complex, low-level stuff like encoding, sockets, floating-point number comparison, etc., transparently to the user. Hard stuff shouldn't be.

We understand that this philosophy may lead to longer source code, more verbose statements, and extra steps to reach an end, but it should make coding in LDPL easier and more enjoyable than in other languages.

As one user once put it, "Usually when I'm programming, I feel like I'm in a big fancy jet and there's a lot of turbulence and it's not going well but then all of a sudden it's smooth air again and the drink cart comes along and I get a ginger ale and it's great. But with LDPL, I feel like I'm a cub scout out in the woods with a box of matches and a hatchet and my Scout's Handbook (the LDPL Docs) just exploring and figuring it out as I go. Whenever I run into a problem I just check my handbook and, sure enough, there's a solution right there waiting for me!".

We want to make LDPL a language you'll love not because it lets you do many things in one line or because of how modern it is: but because it's designed to stay by your side and tell you everything's is going to be okay even when things look rough.

Installing LDPL

Clone this repository. Go into the cloned directory, open a terminal and run make and make install. You can also optionally make man to re-build the man documentation (PHP is required for this). This will install LDPL and the LDPL documentation (man ldpl) on your system. LDPL requires only C++11 to compile.

🍺 Homebrew

If you prefer Homebrew, you can install LDPL by running brew install ldpl.

🐦 Snap

If you prefer Snap, you can install LDPL by running snap install ldpl-lang.

Learning LDPL and Read the Docs

If you want to learn how to code in LDPL, there's a little tutorial at https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/ldpl/. Also, be sure to check the examples on the official LDPL website.

The LDPL documentation is available here. The documentation is also uploaded to the docs folder of this repository and can be read and modified from there.

The LDPL documentation can also be found on your system using man ldpl when you install LDPL by using make install. The man page is also available in the man folder of this repository. If you download a precompiled LDPL binary, the man documentation is included as ldpl.1, but you will have to install it yourself.

How to use this compiler

To use the compiler, you must have a C++ compiler already installed on your system and have mapped it to c++ on your PATH. The LDPL Compiler compiles LDPL code to C++ code, and thus this is a requirement for it to work.

Once the compiler is set up, write some LDPL source code, for example source.ldpl. Then compile the source code using ldpl source.ldpl. The compiled, executable binary file will be saved as source-bin. For more information on the compiler, run ldpl -h and check the docs.

C++ extensions

LDPL supports extensions written in C++. Extensions are .cpp, .o, or .a files that can be imported into your program.

For a guide to writing and building C++ extensions, see the LDPL official documentation.

How can I contribute to LDPL?

There are many ways to contribute to the LDPL project. You can fix bugs, add issues, write examples, write software in LDPL, etc. Check out the contribution guide for more information. Most anything is very welcome! Even telling your friends about LDPL is a very easy and very useful contribution.

Contributors are expected to behave by the LDPL Code of Conduct. TL;DR: be nice to everyone.

Community

If you want to talk to the rest of us, join the LDPL community in the LDPL Programming Language Telegram Group! There's also r/LDPL on Reddit. You are also welcome to open new LDPL channels anywhere else.

Supporting the LDPL Project

There is LDPL merchandise available, due to popular request. We've paired with TeePublic to bring you everything from shirts, to mousepads, to coffee mugs. All money made from selling these goodies goes to funding the language, paying for the server that keeps the LDPL website online, etc.

Visit the LDPL Donations and Merchandise page for more information.

Getting Help

If you have any questions regarding the LDPL project, you are welcome to submit an issue to this repository, check the LDPL website or join the community channels stated in the previous section. There are no dumb questions, just ask away.

📜 License

The LDPL Compiler is distributed under the Apache 2.0 License. All LDPL Dinosaur logos were created by Lartu and are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

ldpl's People

Contributors

Stargazers

Watchers

ldpl's Issues

Add file operations

The language needs portable file operations, as using EXECUTE along with cat and echo (or whatever) is not portable to windows.

Text vectors not working correctly

Normally in LDPL, text variables are by default initialized to "", the empty string. I've just noticed this is not the case with vectors. If you declare a text vector and then access a non-initialized index, the value stored there will be 0. No "0", but 0. This has to do with how LDPL declares and stores variables. Long story short, when text variables are declared, they are assigned the value of "" by default. When vectors are initialized, no values are assigned, you can't assign a value to every possible subindex of the vector, so when you try to access an uninitialized index you get the default value for an uninitialized variable in LDPL, that is 0.

This will be fixed soon as it is not the intended behavior of this data structure.

Broken conversion from negative number to string

When a negative number (for example -12.2) is stored in a TEXT variable, a 0 is appended before it.

For example this:

data:
strVar is text

procedure:
store -12.989 in strVar
display strVar crlf

Displays 0-12.989.

Expressions

LDPL should really support expressions. It's very cumbersome to have to use

MULTIPLY someVar BY someConstant IN temp_var
ADD initialValue TO temp_var in TEMP_var

to do initialValue + someVar * someConstant. Given that LDPL compiles to C++, adding expressions to the language should be fairly easy. I'm not saying that IF statements or WHILE statements should support them (it would be nice, though), I'm saying that there should be some statement like

IN var SOLVE EXPRESSION initialValue + someVar * someConstant

Replace FILE-LOADED with ERROR-CODE and ERROR-TEXT

Right now, LDPL has one control variable, FILE-LOADED, that's used by the language to tell whether a file has been loaded right or not. That's a little specific, as many other statements could also benefit from having a control variable to check if they executed correctly or not. This variable should be replaced with two other variables, ERROR-CODE, that should store an error number regarding the result of the operation, and ERROR-TEXT that should store a human readable report of what went wrong (or not).

FILE-LOADED is declared here and used here. At the moment no other function than LOAD FILE uses it, but WRITE TO, APPEND TO, numeric ACCEPT and type conversions should use it as well.

Add multiline strings

LDPL generated binaries are not static

I tried compiling a simple LDPL program on a linux-arm machine and, while it compiled and ran, it wouldn't run on a different linux-arm machine. I got this error:

$ ./hi-arm 
./hi-arm: /lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.21' not found (required by ./hi-arm)

Adding compile_line+=" -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ "; to ldpl.cpp and rebuilding the compiler fixed it:

$ ./hi-arm 
hi, arm!

However the binary size balloons from 90K to 1.5M.

Should LDPL programs be static, like the compiler itself? I think so yea?

Add STORE LENGTH OF <vector> to the standard.

@dvkt has made a wonderful contribution to the language and it should be added to the standard. The website should also be pushed to a separate repository.

Tests

A set of tests should be designed and setup along with a test script to test each new commit made to ldpl without much effort.

Add audio playback support

Check this and add audio playback support to the language. Maybe something like:

DATA:
myAudio IS AUDIO

PROCEDURE:
LOAD AUDIO "audio.mp3" IN myAudio
PLAY myAudio
...
PAUSE myAudio
PLAY myAudio LOOPING
...
STOP myAudio

SET VOLUME OF myAudio TO number

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3636715/cross-platform-sound-api-for-games

Update MAKE INSTALL in the docs

https://docs.ldpl-lang.org/about-ldpl/using-the-ldpl-compiler this part is outdated compared to the readme found in this repo. The installation instructions should be copied from here.

Binary number support

It would be nice if LDPL could work with binary data. It would probably need two things:

Support for binary (0b1010) and hex (0xFF) number literals.
Support for bit operations.

Maybe the commands could look like this:

BITWISE A AND B IN C
BITWISE A OR B IN C
BITWISE A XOR B IN C
BITWISE NOT A IN C
BITWISE SHIFT A LEFT BY B IN C
BITWISE SHIFT A RIGHT BY B IN C
GET BIT AT N FROM A IN C

Would this be a good candidate for the language or should it be an extension?

Add GOTO to the language

Due to popular request, GOTO should be added to the language.

Check if LDPL compiles statically for Windows

@dvkt I think that on this commit, Windows hability to compile static binaries was broken. Since you added the __linux__ check, do you by any chance know what the Windows equivalent would be?

Thank you!

Add issues for new contributors

Exec reporting incorrect exit code

Tested this on Mac and Linux, seems like the exit code is getting misreported:

$ cat report.ldpl
DATA:
code is number
PROCEDURE:
execute "sh bad.sh" and store exit code in code
display "exit code: " code crlf

$ cat bad.sh
#!/bin/sh
exit 1

$ ldpl report.ldpl
LDPL: Compiling...
* File(s) compiled successfully.
* Saved as report-bin

$ ./report-bin
exit code: 256

$ sh bad.sh
$ echo "exit code: $status"
exit code: 1

Document the -f flags

I added the -f flags to the compiler. You can use -f= to pass to the C++ compler (you could use -i too, I guess, but having both makes things clearer for me). I should document how it works.

Time functions

Some way to SLEEP the program for N seconds would be nice.

Copy vectors

The spec says STORE NUMBER-VAR or NUMBER or TEXT-VAR or TEXT IN NUMBER-VAR or TEXT-VAR so vectors are not included. Are the plans to keep it that way?

I get LDPL Error: Malformed statement (copy-v.lsc:9) when running this program:

DATA:
v1 is text vector
v2 is text vector

PROCEDURE:
store "En" in v1:0
store "To" in v1:1

store v1 in v2

Random numbers not so random

Maybe the seed is constant by accident? I get the same results each time, it seems:

$ cat rand.ldpl 
DATA:
r is number
i is number

PROCEDURE:
while i is less than 5 do
  store random in r
  display r crlf
  incr i
repeat

$ for i in {1..5}; do echo "# ${i}"; ./rand-bin; done
# 1
0.365382414946976
0.982248013830859
0.642368455250919
0.28662740219693
0.346748723809956
# 2
0.365382414946976
0.982248013830859
0.642368455250919
0.28662740219693
0.346748723809956
# 3
0.365382414946976
0.982248013830859
0.642368455250919
0.28662740219693
0.346748723809956
# 4
0.365382414946976
0.982248013830859
0.642368455250919
0.28662740219693
0.346748723809956
# 5
0.365382414946976
0.982248013830859
0.642368455250919
0.28662740219693
0.346748723809956

Add a "wanted" section to the readme so people know what they can contribute with

emacs support
sockets library / wrapper
~~telegram bot library / wrapper~~
~~irc lib / wrapper~~
~~expression solver~~

Label names

Hey @dvkt I've found this:

bool is_label(string & token){
    return !isdigit(token[0]) && token[0] != ':' && token[0] != '"';
}

Why can't labels be numbers or start with : or be strings? Any particular reasons?

Complete COUNT

At the moment the skeleton for a COUNT statement is defined within ldpl.cpp but it's not been fully written.

if(line_like("COUNT $str-expr FROM $str-expr IN $num-var", tokens, state))
    {
        if(state.section_state != 2)
            error("COUNT statement outside PROCEDURE section (\033[0m" + current_file + ":"+ to_string(line_num)+"\033[1;31m)");
        //C Code
        //TODO
        return;
    }

This should be completed.

Make a gitbook for LDPL

Using special argv vector in IF control flow statement returns error

Given the following code:

DATA:
i IS NUMBER
local.min IS NUMBER
local.max IS NUMBER

PROCEDURE:
STORE 0 IN i
WHILE i IS LESS THAN argc DO
    IF i IS EQUAL TO 0 THEN
        STORE argv:i IN local.min
        STORE argv:i IN local.max
    END IF

    IF argv:i IS LESS THAN local.min THEN
        STORE argv:i IN local.min
    END IF

    IF argv:i IS GREATER THAN local.max THEN
        STORE argv:i IN local.max
    END IF

    ADD i AND 1 IN i
REPEAT
DISPLAY "Min (" local.min ") Max (" local.max ")" CRLF

I get the Error: Malformed statement error for line 14 being IF argv:i IS LESS THAN local.min THEN.

If I assign argv:i to a variable it works:

STORE argv:i IN n
IF n IS LESS THAN local.min THEN

Is this a bug or a feature?

EMPTY VECTOR

What do you think about an EMPTY VECTOR vec command that clears the content of a vector?

I am splitting apart string into vectors in a loop, and right now I'm clearing the vector by hand. Maybe that's okay though?

Mac OS binary for LDPL 3.0.0

Hey @dvkt! Could you please -when you have the time, no rush- compile a macOS binary for LDPL 3.0.0 and upload it to the release? For a major release like this one, I'd be nice to have a binary for each major operating system and unfortunately I don't have a Mac made in the last ten years.

Thanks!

Add tests for new features

Explanation:
In the LDPL Test Battery we write LDPL code tests to test the language. We require some tests for the GET INDEX OF, COUNT, SUBSTRING and TRIM statements of the language, as well as for the LIST data type. Any help with any of these would be greatly appreciated.

Support for environment variables

I don't think there's a way to get ENV variables in LDPL currently, right?

If not, they could either be pre-set like argv and argc, or there could be a new statement like STORE ENV AT "PATH" IN $path to do a lookup.

Windows binary is broken

The code execution cannoy proceed because libgcc_s_dw-1.dll was not found.

min version statement

Add a command that must be put at the beginning of a file that determines the minimum LDPL version that can run the script.

Maybe something like REQUIRED VERSION "1.0.0"

Change current importing process

Right now, when you import a .ldpl file into an LDPL project all the files get compiled one after another sequentially. This means that if I import file1, file2 and file3, variables in file 1 will be declared first, then its code will be compiled, then variables in file2 will be declared, etc. In the end this means that if in file1 I want to use a variable or a sup-procedure declared in file2 this will be impossible.

I think that probably the best way to fix this would be to make a big file copying all three DATA sections together and all PROCEDURE sections together and then compiling.

Incorrect Compiled On Date

For some reason the 'compiled on' date displayed by the ldpl executable is behind by exactly one day.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

~/code/ldpl[master]$ date
Tue Mar 19 13:58:42 EDT 2019
~/code/ldpl[master]$ cd src
~/code/ldpl/src[master]$ make
g++ -g ldpl.o -o ldpl -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++
~/code/ldpl/src[master]$ ldpl --version
This is LDPL 19 version 2.1.1

Copyright 2018-2019, Martín del Río

Standard and documentation can be found on ldpl.lartu.net.
Source code can be found at https://github.com/lartu/ldpl.

LDPL may be copied only under the terms of the GNU General Public License 3.0.

Compiled on Mon Mar 18 14:53:28 EDT 2019

Information about the machine the error occured on:

~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
Release:	16.04
Codename:	xenial
~$ uname -a
Linux vsc 4.15.0-45-generic #48~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 29 18:03:48 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

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Octal numerals

When in LDPL you execute the statement

DISPLAY 0123

the value 83 is printed instead of 123. One would expect 123 to be printed, but this other number is printed instead because C++ asumes numerals that start with 0 (even 0 itself) to be encoded in octal base.

The same happens with vector accesses, for example if you store 1 in vector:0012, if you read vector:12 you'll find a 0, for the index that was accessed is not 12 but octal 12.

This should be fixed by checking if numerals have leading 0s and removing them (except, of course, if they are followed by a . and decimals).

ñ can't be used in variable names

Document EXTERNAL SUB-PROCEDURES and FILE-LOADED

Complete COUNT and other TODOs

There are a bunch of //TODOs in ldpl.cpp, for statements (like COUNT) programmed into the language but not coded (you can use them in your code but they won't do anything). They should be completed.

Undocumented number to string conversion in vector sub-indexes

Number vector sub-indexes are converted to strings using std::to_string, leading to odd behavior.

For example, this example displays "dinosaurio" and then "dragón" because 0 is converted to "0.000000", but the reference doesn't suggest this behavior.

Document GET INDEX OF, COUNT, SUBSTRING and TRIM

These new functions have been added to the language. I would document them now, but it's quite late and I've gotta hit the sack. If someone wants to document them, you are more than welcome to do so. If not, I'll get to it soon.

Add INCLUDE statement?

Not sure if it's beyond the scope of this language given how its a bit tongue in cheek but it would be nice to have the ability to split a program up into components and then include them aka the COBOL INCLUDE statement.

Given a directory structure like so:

.
└── src
    ├── main.ldpl
    ├── member-name.ldpl
    └── another-member-name.ldpl

You could within the DATA division allow an INCLUDE statement with similar syntax to COBOL:

DATA:
    INCLUDE member-name.ldpl
    INCLUDE another-member-name.ldpl

Or maybe have an additional INCLUDE division?

In either case the include could act as a "copy-paste" merging the DATA and PROCEDURE divisions of the included source into the requesting file in the order in which they are included.

You could go one further and allow the INCLUDE statement in the PROCEDURE division to open the possibility of dynamic includes ;)

In adding includes it opens this language up to the entertaining possibility of libraries.

Names can't be numbers rule missing

Identifier Naming Schemes doesn't say anything about numbers as identifiers.

EXTERNAL SUB-PROCEDURE

Hello there, @dvkt! Yesterday I added EXTERNAL SUB-PROCEDURE to the language. Essentially it's a way to declare functions that have been forward declared in C++, so I can call LDPL functions from C++.

So in C++ I can, for example, do this:

LDPL_SUBPROCEDURE();

void myFunction(){
  LDPL_VAR = 18;
  LDPL_SUBPROCEDURE();
}

And in LDPL I do:

data:
ldpl-var is external number

procedure:
external sub-procedure ldpl/subprocedure
  display "My number is " ldpl-var
end sub-procedure

I want to know what do you think about this. I made an IRC bot library for LDPL that I'll be uploading today and I needed this for that to work.

No C++ Compiler Found

LDPL should tell you when there's no C++ compiler found on your path instead of just throwing a "program c++ not found" error.

Add url and new text design to the LDPL logo

File loading should exit the program if not found

Right now, when you use LOAD FILE and the file can't be loaded, the whole program is closed. This shouldn't happen.

Complete GET INDEX OF

At the moment the skeleton for a GET INDEX OF statement is defined within ldpl.cpp but it's not been fully written.

if(line_like("GET INDEX OF $str-expr FROM $str-expr IN $num-var", tokens, state))
    {
        if(state.section_state != 2)
            error("GET INDEX OF statement outside PROCEDURE section (\033[0m" + current_file + ":"+ to_string(line_num)+"\033[1;31m)");
        //C Code
        //TODO
        return;
    }