lua.cratera/README.md

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.

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.