Mouser

After contemplating this for awhile, I have decided to attempt something I always wanted to do, but never felt like I had the expertise to do it. I still don’t feel like I have the expertise, but I have decided to take the plunge and try it. I always wondered what it would be like to create my own programming language. I love checking out other programming languages and have always been a fan of other programmers that design their own language. Wouter van Oortmerssen is my favorite and if you visit his web site, you will see he has created many languages. I have a picture of the inventor of Lisp, John McCarthy, hanging in my office. He stares at me everyday as if to say “just go for it you weak minded fool!”.

I started by asking my friend Chris Handley if he would mentor me through this project, because I will definitely need guidance and help! Plus Chris had started helping me before when I was playing with a toy interpreter written with PortablE. I posted about it here at NovaCode. Lucky for me, he was willing to accept the challenge!

This will be a scripting language designed to be small and easy to use. The language will be named “Mouser”. I will be using PortablE to write it and will be targetting the AROS operating system first and foremost.. Since I am and have been for many years an AROS fan and supporter, I thought it would be fun to target it first. AROS is also the reason I chose Mouser to be the name of the language. By using PortablE, it should be easy to port it to other operating systems in the future like classic Amiga OS and Microsoft Windows.

I’m not expecting this to be a ground breaking language or have a lot of users nagging me because they cannot wait for updates so they can drool over the awesome code they could write with this language. AROS has some scripting languages right now like Ami-Lua and Regina REXX, so I don’t know how much AROS really needs another scripting language. But this is more for my benefit. It gives me a project I’m interested in doing that should be a lot of fun. If someone uses it in the long run, I’ll be tickled to death. That is a long way off, so for now I look forward to it making it to the point of actually being usable.

Here are some general thoughts about Mouser I have thus far. A small scripting language that could possibly be used in AROS. It could possibly be used to add to the functionality of AROS shell scripts. The language would be imperative and it would need to be easy to use. Automatic garbage collection would be a must. Users of Mouser would not need to declare variables. If a variable is mentioned, it will look for it and if it exists, it will read it or update it, otherwise it will create it. Data structures for now will only include Arrays and Strings. More power will be added later and this will be kept in mind while writing the language. The toy interpreter already started in PortablE will be the basis for Mouser.

I will be keeping track of my progress on this blog. This will help me document for informational purposes as well as make it fun to post about the progress. The first thing I need to work on is creating a linked list to store variables. Stay tuned and wish me luck!