The SLAP Programming Language

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WARNING!! THIS LANGUAGE IS IN DEVELOPMENT (AND FOR LEARNING PURPOSES). ANYTHING CAN CHANGE AT ANY MOMENT.

🖐 SLAP stands for "SLow And Powerless." And I hope to make it "Powerful" someday.

SLAP is a dynamically- and strongly-typed, object-oriented programming language. Its syntax is a member of the C family with a bit of difference.

Example

As of March 2022, you can write pretty decent, small programs in SLAP.

Note: The SLAP-to-JS transpiler is in progress (see compiler branch).

SLAP-to-JS Compiler Example

Screen.Recording.2022-04-07.at.11.41.19.PM.mov

Installation

On Linux/macOS, you may be able to run the following commands to install SLAP.

$ git clone https://github.com/bichanna/slap.git
$ cd slap
$ chmod +x ./build.sh 
$ ./build.sh         # The SLAP Vim highlighter automatically gets installed

For Windows, I haven't written bat version of build.sh, so you have to manually compile the source code.

$ nimble build --multimethods:on -d:release

Then, mark it as an executable file if necessary, and try running slap --version.

$ slap --version
SLAP 0.0.3

You may want to test current SLAP you just built before running your programs.

$ nimble test

TODO

Note: If you have a feature request, please open an issue.

Main

• Basic Data Types
  • Integer
  • Float
  • String
  • Boolean
  • Null
  • List
  • Map
• Basic Arithmetics
• Variables
• If Statements
  • elif
  • else
• While Loops
• For Loops
  • Break
  • Continue
  • "Enhanced" for loop (in the form of forEach)
• Try-except Blocks
• Functions
  • Lambdas (anonymous functions)
  • Default Arguments
  • Rest Parameters
• Standard Library
  • Std
  • String
  • OS
  • I/O interfaces
  • Math
  • Networking
• Classes
  • Class Methods
  • Inheritance
  • Abstract Class (Interface)
• Import
• Concurrency
• Virtual Machine Compiler

Others

• Assignment Shorthands (e.g, +=, *=)
• String Interpolation
• Optional Type Annotations
• Multi-line Comments
• Vim Highlighter
• VSCode Highlighter
• Transpiler (to JavaScript)
• Newline As Statement Separator

Contribution

Bug reports and contributions are always welcome :)
Please be sure to add test files if you want to add new features (see tests directory for more info).

Credits

I learned a lot from

• Oak programming language by thesephist
• Bob Nystrom (munificent)'s great book, Crafting Interpreters.