gfox - homebrew computer science

A few days ago I realised that it has been over one whole year ago that I last published something here. The reason is - once more - the huge amount of time I spend at the university. But despite that I have been working on Programma and can now report having finished a first implementation. Containing only a very small subset of the ideas I want to include in the language this implementation - version 0.0 - can only be considered a very first prototype.

Finally after over one year of (often interrupted) work I have completed a first specification of Programma. I could have released this specification almost a month earlier (indeed I had it ready on my hard drive for over a week now) if I had not been fully occupied by my first lectures in computer science. And that's also why I can't expect to continue Programma development before February 2011. At least some of the things I learn at UdS have already made into the specification (any fellow students of mine are encouraged to find them! :P)

In the last days before my studies at UdS I have written the very first program in Programma: The famous WATOR simulation. During the development of this program I have continued to modify the specification which resulted in some major changes like the introduction of basic integer operations and a new type system. Having completed WATOR I can say that Programma is now advanced enough to write some nice programs. But of course the current specification is only a subset of what I hope to achieve in the future...