Re: Scripting!

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 01.05.2014 um 18:03 schrieb Kevin Ingwersen:

> Hey guys!
> 
> Thanks for your replies - and for the little fun hidden within the lines…that 
> exception got me laughing for good. :)
> 
> I did see Small/StepTalk actualy, but neither of them did compile on my Mac - 
> Cling included. I did find Cling actually, but it throws about 29 errors on a 
> single file, that of course terminates the compilation for good.
> 
> I was indeed looking for a scripting language with the square brackets, as it 
> gives the language a nice structure, realy.
> 
> I will look at the LanguageKit and see what it offers! It so far sounds very 
> interesting, especially that it uses a JIT compiler.
> 
> Since there does not seem to be any scripting language with valid Objective-C 
> syntax, I might just sit down and write my own, with the help of a more 
> experienced developer then. Might be interesting to hook it up with GnuStep 
> as a framework to extend programs with a scripting language…who knows, 
> somebody may find this interesting. :)

I will definitively be interested in the results!

It might help in testing/developing algorithms and writing some simple scripts.

And if things work, it should be possible to copy parts of the sources and 
compile them.

What I would not expect (because it is very complex for a scripting language) 
is to handle #import, @interface, @implementation etc.

You might also want to take a look into:

http://git.goldelico.com/?p=mySTEP.git;a=tree;f=objc2pp;h=c858992617777a1c34963c15a2f3eba2554d72ea;hb=HEAD

which is a quite small and simple Obj-C scanner/parser and AST builder. And 
completely self-contained (no need for external libraries). Just flex+bison for 
compilation.

It should not be very difficult to modify it that you can write into a file:

#!/usr/local/bin/objcscript
main() {
[Object sendMessage];
}

and make chmod +x. Then you can run it directly from the shell.

But: it is more an experiment than a working and debugged compiler. Especially 
the grammar isn't mature.

-- hns