I never realized that the concept of a pointer could get so confusing. Over the last two months I came up with a number of different ideas that all involve pointers and got my brain all twisted up in knots when I got to the pointer part.

When I left …

It has not been a good week. I set out on Tuesday to actually add real objects to PICKLE, with a hashmap of properties and multiple inheritance and everything. Suffice to say, that wasn’t easy. Between null pointer dereferencing, sloppy APIs, and an incomplete algorithm, it took several hours …

I’ve been trying to write some of the code to implement PICKLE’s parser and evaluator – it’s not going well. The hard part is that everything in PICKLE is done using continuation-passing style. Everywhere the evaluator has a chance of calling user code (that may capture a continuation …

I’ve been tinkering with David Johnson-Davies’ uLisp interpreter for a while now. It’s designed to be small first and foremost, so that the core part that fits on the rather wimpy ATmega328 (i.e. an Arduino Uno) will still achieve maximum usefulness. Most of the optimization is achieved …

After I made the last post – where I decided that PICKLE would be done in continuation-passing style – I revisited one extremely simple toy programming language done in continuation-passing style I found online (here). I figured it would be a good example of how I could implement PICKLE. The only problem …

I’ve been doing a little bit of everything lately. I’ve done a little work on PICKLE, trying to implement it first in Python so I don’t have to worry about the garbage collector. (The pattern-matching code is extremely complicated and screwed with my brain until I realized …

I did a lot of work on Tinobsy, the garbage collector for PICKLE. It’s pretty robust now, and passes all my tests – plus I translated it to C++ so I can take advantage of C++’s syntactic sugar for objects. All I think that I’ll be doing with …

Yet again I find myself writing a garbage collector.

I did a little work on PICKLE’s Javascript implementation, and perhaps Javascript is not the right choice. Because Javascript’s inheritance model is so similar to PICKLE’s, yet slightly different, implementing the inheritance (even with ES6 Proxys) is …

I’ve been working quite a lot on my second programming language attempt, PICKLE. Admittedly, programming it in C has been a real chore. I started following the Make-A-Lisp tutorial to try to give myself some plan for executing PICKLE. Mal, unfortunately, recommends dynamically typed languages; that unfortunately is a …

I’ve been playing around a little bit with LIL on my ESP32 arduino. It works, but there are a few things I don’t like. LIL isn’t object-oriented by default, so I can’t do a lot of what I am used to writing code in Javascript and …