Xlerb – A Compiled "Forth" for the Beam
Hello I've been working on a small stack language for the BEAM in my free time called 'Xlerb'. I read Starting Forth and thought it would be interesting to see if you could send messages to other stacks etc, and the BEAM seemed like a great fit. Xlerb is a small leex/yecc grammar and a simple-ish compiler that takes Forth-ish code and turns it into regular BEAM modules. The modules it produces just export functions from stack to stack, so there's a good interop story with Elixir/Erlang (if you'd ever want to do that?). I've the syntax a bit beyond a 'strict' forth with pattern…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello I've been working on a small stack language for the BEAM in my free time called 'Xlerb'. I read Starting Forth and thought it would be interesting to see if you could send messages to other stacks etc, and the BEAM seemed like a great fit. Xlerb is a small leex/yecc grammar and a simple-ish compiler that takes Forth-ish code and turns it into regular BEAM modules. The modules it produces just export functions from stack to stack, so there's a good interop story with Elixir/Erlang (if you'd ever want to do that?). I've the syntax a bit beyond a 'strict' forth with pattern matching, that makes it feel a bit more natural of a BEAM language (with different function heads etc). It was a fun exercise translating that into the Erlang primitives of case, send, receive etc. I've got a website at https://xlerb.wtf with a bit more, and you can get the code/compiler/repl at https://github.com/shawa/xlerb Let me know what you think!
Does the same job
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Hello HN, This is a project of mine which contains a working, self-hosting, Forth interpreter for a single instruction machine. The instruction is called "SUBLEQ", short for (SUB)tract and branch if (L)ess than or (EQ)ual. Everything has to be synthesized from that instruction, bitwise operators have to be implemented in terms of repeated subtraction and self modifying code used to create indirect loads and stores. In doing this it is possible to port a working language that is capable of generating new images for the machine. It's possible to play with it online at:…
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