🐫Beetlang

Every year I write a parser. I'm kinda getting tired of that.

Beetlang is the concept of a programming language for the uxn ecosystem I want to develop. It is going to simplify common uxntal idioms, while still providing access to raw bytes. I want it to be a superset of TAL.

As we know, uxn is a beetroot, so the name of the language is Beetlang.

I am far from deciding the final set of features. This is a draft.

You can feel the influence of Mycomarkup.

Additions

Functions

In uxn, you do functions all the time: 

@add-two ( x -- x+1 )
   #02 ADD
JMP2r

There is the pattern:

  1. The label.

  2. A comment describing expected stack and the output stack.

  3. Indented body.

  4. The jumping back opcode.

The comment means nothing. You can lie there. The jumping back can be messed up.

Equivalent Beet code would look like this: 

func add-two x -- x+1 {
   #02 ADD
}

Not much of an abstraction, but imagine what things a Beet compiler could do. It could try to prove the correctness of the signature!

Dance

An attempt to make code self-documenting by nature.

There are three directives:. All text after a directive is a comment. Maybe I should put it before?

  • = the let directive.

  • : the rearrange directive generates needed ROT, DUP, etc opcodes to get the given result. There can be many. I suppose there are limits to that.

  • + the execute directive. 

dance {
   x y z     = Three bytes are on stack
   y z x     : Get x to the top
   y z x x   :
   #01 ADD   +
   y z x x+1 =
   x+1 x y z :
}

Some assertions can also be made.

Loops 

times <operation> {
   <code>
}

It takes the number from top of the stack and executes the loop that number of times, and then POPs it.

You specify the operation done with the number on stack (it decreases). You will usually just SWP it.

Strongly typed Varvara devices

And their names will be fixed. There is a convention already anyway.

Less cryptic graphics operations 

paint sprite {
   addr ;stone
   put
   right 1
   reverse
   color 3
   put
}

Something with the Screen/auto port can be done too.

Constant expressions 

const {
   #03 #02 ADD
}

will compile to just #05. Defined macros and Beetlang are available in constant expressions.

CLI commands

  • cat game.beet | beet > game.tal compiles beet to tal

  • cat game.beet | beet --locate-addr sprites/stone finds the location of the given label

  • cat game.beet | beet --run compiles twice and runs the ROM with some emulator it finds, and deletes intermediate files, if any.

As you can see, input is fed through stdin.

To think about: