cognate-lang/cognate

A human readable quasi-concatenative programming language

cognate's Issues

What is the font name in screenshots/illustrations in README ?

It looks cool and very sexy.

But what is the font name ? Would be cool if you credit it.

Actual interpreter for microcontroller?

From the readme:

CognaC (the Cognate Compiler) compiles Cognate sources directly into C. This produces very small and rather fast binaries, allowing Cognate to outperform most dynamic languages. This also makes Cognate a candidate for scripting in embedded environments, such as microcontrollers.

... but microcontrollers can't compile and run C. Is there a "pure interpreter" for a microcontroller somewhere that actually executes the code instead of transpiling it to C? If there isn't, how do I make one out of this code here?

Speed of restrict_chars

Due to potentially being called a lot in large programs, the speed of restrict_chars could be extremely important. Is there a reason for the replacement words, here:

	char* with[]	 = {"DASH", "XMARK", "QMARK", "EQ", "LT", "GT", "PLUS", "STAR", "SLASH"};

to be full strings, instead of say, 'D', 'X', 'Q', 'E', 'L', 'G', 'P', 'S', 'H'?
The only thing I can think of is debugging.
If these were to be replaced with single char versions, you'd be able to much more quickly remove them.

Note this will not affect other variables, due to the sanitation process - I can provide examples if needed.

We could always provide two versions, using a flag like DEBUG to enable the slower version.

Documentation for Cognate words??

There isn't any documentation on each builtin word, and so for the ones that take and/or return blocks, the semantics are very confusing. Case in particular. What are the semantics of that, and everything else? Writing it as Forth stack-effect diagrams or just some example code would help.

Word synonyms for binary operators

Cognate looks really cool. The one place I think the literate aspect can be improved is with the binary operators, which are hard to read in a sentence as prefix symbols.

Print * 3 by - 7 2;  

If the following looks nice, I will make a pull request to add synonyms like this:

Print Multiply 3 by Subtract 7 from 2;

and so on, + would be Add, Inequal? and Equal? for != and ==, because of the same for While (!= "done" Twin Input)

Creating C file for non-existent file

Something that is most likely a bug, is that when you try to compile a nonexistant cognate file, it creates a C file for it, which is both annoying and wrong. Evidence:

Weird Segfault.

I noticed a weird segfault that appeared in my code. Here is a small reproduction:
This segfaults when ran, yet

Def Push-op as (Let Op; Push Op);
Let Commands be List ("+" "-" "%" "*")
Let Error be False;
List ();
For command in Commands
    Case "+" (Push-op)
    Case "-" (Push-op)
    Case "*" (Push-op)
    else (Set Bad-command; Set Error to True; Prints ("Error: Unknown Command " Bad-command "\n"));
Do If Not Error
    (Set Commands; For command in Commands Print)
    (Print "");
Clear;

This code works,

Def Push-op as (Let Op; Push Op);
Let Commands be List ("+" "-" "%" "*");
Let Error be False;
List ();
For command in Commands
    Case "+" (Push-op)
    Case "-" (Push-op)
    Case "*" (Push-op)
    else (Set Error to True; Put "Error: Unknown Command "; Print);
If Not Error
    (Set Commands; For command in Commands Print)
    (Print "");
Clear;

and the only difference seems to be this code which causes the segfault

else (Set Bad-command; Set Error to True; Prints ("Error: Unknown Command " Bad-command "\n"));

as opposed to this code which works.

else (Set Error to True; Put "Error: Unknown Command "; Print);

Further information: Prints doesn't segfault by itself, based on this reproduction I made that works,

Let Bar be  "Bar"; Prints ("hielo " Bar "\n");

Build fails in clang 15.x

In the C23 standard, functions without prototypes (int func() instead of int func(void)) are removed. Clang has deprecated the feature all versions of C as a result. When I try to compile the hello world example with cognac, I get the following error log:

hello.c:41:21: error: a block declaration without a prototype is deprecated  [-Werror,-Wstrict-prototypes]
typedef void(^BLOCK)();
                    ^
                     void
hello.c:323:26: error: a function declaration without a prototype is deprecated in all versions of C [-Werror,-Wstrict-prototypes]
static void assert_impure();
                         ^
                          void
hello.c:409:26: error: a function declaration without a prototype is deprecated in all versions of C [-Werror,-Wstrict-prototypes]
static void debugger_step()
                         ^
                          void
hello.c:605:26: error: a function declaration without a prototype is deprecated in all versions of C [-Werror,-Wstrict-prototypes]
static void assert_impure()
                         ^
                          void
hello.c:1971:23: error: a function declaration without a prototype is deprecated in all versions of C [-Werror,-Wstrict-prototypes]
static void VAR(debug)()
                      ^
                       void
5 errors generated.