Gloop, the universe and everything?

I don't know that this blog is going to turn out to be. But the name is a reference to the three programming languages bloop, floop, and gloop that Douglas Hofstadter introduced to illustrate a few points in computability.

bloop is especially designed not to be turing-complete, and he removes one constraint to create floop which is. That one still is unable to compute every imaginable function and thus he continues to gloop, only to confront us with the fact that there is no such thing. No programming language can be more powerful that floop.

From the theoretical point of view, that is. In practice there is a big difference in how much effort you need to express in different languages what you want the computer to do. Programming is much about abstracting away repeating chores, and it is astonishing how much of those can't be automated in the popular languages of the day.

By now I am actively suffering from the fact that there are so many things that a good language would make easier but such language either don't exist or aren't reasonable to use in the field I need them.

Closures, anonymous functions and proper lexical scoping are the things I would like to play with. But a proper macro system is the one thing that would really spare me a lot of tedious work. To be able to toy with these concepts I am hacking a language that is more or less going to be a (im)proper java: static typing with local functions and closures, and most importantly with means to extend the parser and to write macros that can use the full power of the language.

One additional aspect is to make the virtual machine fully persistent meaning that it can simply resume execution of a program after the VM has terminated for some external reason.

So this language and other linguistical musings will be the topic of this blog. I'm probably not going to rant about aspherical lenses for glasses here.

And no, I don't have the compiler ready. At the moment I have a very basic lexer and parser. The third version, actually. I started with C++ (ugly), then Ruby (good), then Nice (not bad). The last try is partly because the Ruby version was already two months ago and partly because I have hopes that the Nice version is more easily translated into the target language itself. Next job is to figure out a VM and execution model.