greg 492ef4ae19 Clear up some unused code to reduce compile noise

And add some notes to the README

2018-08-19 15:03:41 -07:00

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Schala - a programming language meta-interpreter

Schala is a Rust framework written to make it easy to create and experiment with toy programming languages. It provides a common REPL, and a trait ProgrammingLanguage with provisions for tokenizing text, parsing tokens, evaluating an abstract syntax tree, and other tasks that are common to all programming languages.

Schala is implemented as a Rust library schala_lib, which provides a schala_main function. This function serves as the main loop of the REPL, if run interactively, or otherwise reads and interprets programming language source files. It expects as input a vector of PLIGenerator, which is a type representing a closure that returns a boxed trait object that implements the ProgrammingLanguage trait, and stores any persistent state relevant to that programming language. The ability to share state between different programming languages is in the works.

About

Schala started out life as an experiment in writing a Javascript-like programming language that would never encounter any kind of runtime value error, but rather always return null under any kind of error condition. I had seen one too many Javascript Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ___ of undefined messages, and I was a bit frustrated. Plus I had always wanted to write a programming langauge from scratch, and Rust is a fun language to program in. Over time I became interested in playing around with other sorts of programming languages as well, and wanted to make the process as general as possible.

The name of the project comes from Schala the Princess of Zeal from the 1995 SNES RPG Chrono Trigger. I like classic JRPGs and enjoyed the thought of creating a language name confusingly close to Scala. The naming scheme for languages implemented with the Schala meta-interpreter is Chrono Trigger characters.

Schala is incomplete alpha software and is not ready for public release.

Languages implemented using the meta-interpreter

The eponymous Schala language is an interpreted/compiled scripting langauge, designed to be relatively simple, but with a reasonably sophisticated type system.
Maaru was the original Schala (since renamed to free up the name Schala for the above language), a very simple dynamically-typed scripting language such that all possible runtime errors result in null rather than program failure.
Robo is an experiment in creating a lazy, functional, strongly-typed language much like Haskell
Rukka is a straightforward LISP implementation