I’ve been up to a lot of stuff in the past few months. Related to programming there are two projects, one of them I’m still working on (and intend to do so for the forseeable future):

• generica, a small, simple & dirty lisp-like language interpreter implemented in ANSI C.
• and Fancy, a new object-oriented dynamic programming language, heavily inspired by Ruby, Smalltalk and Erlang. There’s also a website up, but far from finished: fancy-lang.org – Check it out if you like

So yeah, the latter project I started about 6 weeks ago but didn’t have the time to really work on it until about 3 weeks ago. Since then I’ve managed to implement quite a few features.
Here’s a small overview of features working in Fancy already:

• Class definitions
• Method definitions
• String, Integer, Double, Array, Hash (Hashmap), and Block (lambda function / closure) Literals
• Method and operator calls (sending messages to objects)
• Simple loops
• Support for closures (performance improvements are definately possible though )

There’s still lots of stuff missing, obviously. Mainly most of the standard library (I/O, Threading/Concurrency, Networking, etc…) will have to implemented as well as some runtime features I haven’t finished or started yet. But it’s getting along quite nicely. If anyone dares to try it out, I’d love to hear some feedback, especially hearing some opinions on the overall feel and semantics of the language would be nice. You can get the code on github (see the link above) and try to build it. Compiling instructions are in the README file. Fancy is licensed under the GNU LGPL.

I’m still excited to see where this is gonna go, for myself and possibly others as well. We’ll see.

I’ll probably post some more information on the language and its implementation some time soon. Need to go now.

So yeah, Erlang is fun. It’s really easy to learn, if you ask me. If you know some Prolog, that’ll definately help a bit, since Erlang is influenced by it. But even if you’ve never heard of Prolog before, the language in itself is really small and easy. Just a few concepts you’ll have to learn including those of message passing style concurrency with processes instead of shared memory threads and mutable state. The syntax might seem weird at first, but I found this to be no real burden in the end.

eFreeTPd isn’t finished yet, but I’ll keep up development. It shouldn’t take too long though until there’s a somewhat stable or functional version out

Next time I’ll write a little more on how eFreeTPd actually is implemented in terms of what design and overall structure is used.