I'm a big fan of the Lua programming language. Also I wanted to learn more about Zig and how to make my own language. So I decided to create Marte (Mars in the Portuguese language).
The goal is to fix some of the issues I found while coding in Lua while giving it a bigger purpose. The planned features are as follows:
-
continuekeyword, so we can reduce the use of labels - The ability to execute shell programs easily
- Variables are always local unless declared as global
- The language is typed
- I still don't know the syntax, if it's
int x = 0orx: int = 0 - You can create types like this:
type Coord = {int x = 0, int y = 0}
I do not plan to change the starting index from 1 to 0. This is a core feature of Lua and encourages the programmer to use iterators instead of indexes. You are not supposed to run Lua programs with marte, but I do plan to add a lua_require() to import Lua libraries.
If you have any suggestions to the code or to the project, feel free to create a new Issue. I'm new to both the Zig language and creating a programming language so any help is welcome 😁.
The codebase is a mess for two reasons:
- This is just a personal project and still in development (when the project is more advanced, I'll probably refactor it)
- I'm exploring different Zig coding patterns, so this codebase intentionally does not have a pattern yet
- TODO: write some Marte code examples.