lua.cratera/README.md

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2019-04-09 21:51:05 +02:00
The Cratera Programming Language (and support components)
=========================================================
This repo contains the Cratera to Lua compiler, as well as support components for the Cratera to Lua compiler, namely a pure-Lua Lua tokenizer and a table-based parser thing.
Cratera is a language very similar to Lua, and as such most of the Lua manual applies to it. Additionally, it supports the following syntax sugar, called "traits":
mytable:[mytrait].myfunction(myargument)
which is equivalent to:
mytable[mytrait].myfunction(mytable, myargument)
This syntax sugar is similar to the "methods" syntax sugar ([Lua 5.3 §3.4.10](http://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.4.10),
[Lua 5.2 §3.4.9](http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#3.4.9), [Lua 5.1 §2.5.8](http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#2.5.8)),
and, indeed, `mytable` is only evaluated once.
2019-04-11 18:49:31 +02:00
Why not use LPeg?
-----------------
The use of a custom parsing library boils down to two reasons:
1. LPeg can't stream or produce partial outputs. This just makes it difficult to use for making a compiler.
2. LPeg can't process tables. It's still possible to use LPeg to parse table-based structures, but one must serialize them beforehand, which is... far from ideal, to say the least.