faulda/gls

A unified syntax that compiles into your favorite OOP languages.

GLS - General Language Syntax

A unified syntax that compiles into a number of OOP languages.

Theory

Most object-oriented programming languages today are "pretty much" the same. Declaring variables, PEMDAS operations, calling functions, and so on rarely change; the base concept of a compiled or scripting language with managed memory is very common.

GLS provides a common syntax to describe programming functionality in these common managed languages. .gls files can be compiled into any of the supported languages, and will work approximately the same in all of them.

Syntax

Each line in GLS consists of a function, a colon, and any number of arguments, all separated by spaces.

print line : "GLS!"

• Function: print
• Argument: "GLS!"

print line : GLS will compile to System.Console.WriteLine("GLS!"); in C#, console.log("GLS!"); in TypeScript, and so on.

Parenthesis

You can keep spaces inside your arguments by wrapping characters in parenthesis. This tells the compiler to treat the space as part of the argument instead of a separator.

print line : ("Hello world!")

• Function: print
• Argument: "Hello world!"

Recursion

To pipe the output of one command into another, wrap the inner command with {} brackets.

print line : { operation : 1 plus 2 }

Tidbits

• Each GLS command is idempotent - it doesn't know or care about any preceding or following commands.

Status

Deliverable	Version	Date	Description
C++ compiler	0.1	May 2015	Command-line GLS prototype, written in C++.
TypeScript compiler draft	0.2	July 2015	GLS compiler as a website, written in TypeScript.
TypeScript compiler + C# output	0.3	March 2016	GLS compiler re-written in TypeScript, with correct TypeScript and C# output.
Dogfood	0.4	April 2016	Compiler written in GLS code, working in C# and TypeScript.
Ruby, Python, and Java	0.5	May 2016	Ruby, Python, and Java support.
PowerShell, PHP, ES6 JavaScript, Objective-C, Swift, misc.	0.6	June 2016	Dogfood or reject those languages and other possibilities.
Language specification finalized	0.7	July 2016	Finalized language spec & cleaned internals of code.
General release	1.0	August 2016	Public announcement, glory to everyone.

Intentionally Missing Items

No language is perfect. The following are some seemingly obvious omissions in GLS that are due to languages not supporting them:

Feature	C#	Java	Python	Ruby	TypeScript
Foreach Over Values					Missing
Multiline Lambdas			Missing
Optional Parameters		Missing
Overloaded Functions			Missing	Missing	Missing
String.Replace					Abnormal
Switch Statements			Missing

This list will grow as features are requested.

Intentionally Unsupported Languages

Not all languages work similarly to the supported ones. These will likely never receive GLS support, for the following common reasons (among others):

Language	Manual Pointers	Unusual Classes
C	✓	✓
C++	✓
JavaScript (<ES6)		✓
Rust	✓

This list will grow as languages are requested.

Development

This requires NodeJS. To initialize your build environment, run:

npm install

Building is done via Grunt:

grunt