There are things to like about this implementation and things to
dislike.
Things to like:
- It works.
- The defs are baked into the wordlist.
Cons:
- The def bodies are built at start time by parsing strings. it would
be nice to somehow generate initializer literals if possible. But
would that mess up the garbage collector?
- It requires manual labor to update the defs when defs.txt changes. It
would be nice to have a solution that *make* can use.
C has function pointers, we can put them in the Gperf wordlist, this
makes the interpreter really simple. No need for a dictionary (yet).
Implementing the basis functions will be a bit of a slog, and
I still have to implement definitions, but this is starting to shape up
nicely.
We check terms to see if they're in the wordlist, if they are we reuse
the string from the wordlist instead of allocating a new one.
(I've always wanted to use Gperf so I'm pretty stoked about this!)
...I'm just relearning C semantics. (And they are garbage, as is widely
known.)
I don't think there's much point to this (at the moment) because I don't
want to relearn C (at the moment) and Nim is available (at the moment.)
Really, I'm trying to do away with the entire relationship of C et. al.
to the underlying machine. (For instance, Nim gives you a much nicer
relationship, without the vast distance that, say, Python imposes.) I
should really look at other compiled languages, like Ocaml or Julia.
Simon Forman