README.md

Lost

A general-purpose interpreted programming language written in Rust. Guaranteed to be Blazingly Fast™ :P

Why the name?

This is loosely based on the Lox programming language from Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom.

For obvious reasons, I cannot name it Lust, hence Lox + Rust = Lost :)

Usage

To run the Lost REPL, simply execute cargo run.

To invoke the compiler on a .lost file, pass the file as an argument to the above command, i.e. cargo run file.lost.

Getting started

The syntax is fairly straightforward, and is mostly borrowed from existing languages. Reading the below snippet should suffice to start writing code in Lost.

fn foo(n) {
    if (n == 0) {
        print("zero");
        while (n <= 1) {
            print(n);
            n = n + 1;
        }
        return true;
    } else {
        print("not zero");
        // Post-increment (i++) tends to be ambiguous, both in
        // expected behaviour and actual outcome. We're better
        // off without using it - the only type of increment
        // available is pre-increment (++i).
        for (let i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
            print(i);
        }
        return false;
    }
}

let n = 5; // All numbers are floating point values
print(foo(n)); // false
print(foo(0)); // true, prints "Zero"

let a; // Uninitialised variables are null by default
print(a); // null

// Classes are slightly different compared to other languages.
// There are no fields in the class declaration, only methods.
// Self-referencing works with the `this` keyword.
class Vehicle {
  // The constructor is just a function
  // with the same name as the class
  fn Vehicle() {
    this.wheels = 0;
  }

  fn countWheels() {
    print(this.wheels);
  }
}

// Classes can inherit from a parent class with the `<-` operator
class Car <- Vehicle {
  fn Car() {
    this.wheels = 4;
  }
}

let car = Car();
car.countWheels(); // 4

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. Do whatever you want with it.