Introducing: the Scotch programming language

I worked through the initial chapters of Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Dr. Shriram Krishnamurthi of Brown recently. It was meant to be just an exercise, but I got really into it. From the beginning I did things completely differently from the way they're done in the book - I did everything in Haskell instead of Scheme, which involved writing a parser (definitely more involved than I realized), and my functions and variables were lazily evaluated from the start and utilized a much different form of lexical scope. I ended up coding up a working language interpreter and thus my new programming language, which I'm calling Scotch, was born. ("Scotch" is a veiled reference to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, or whiskey, or scotch tape, or whatever else you want it to be.)

I'm convinced that functional programming is the way of the future, but functional languages sometimes seem pretty scary to newcomers (Lisp's parentheses, Haskell's monads, etc.) Functional programming needs a language that can do what Ruby and Python did for object oriented programming, a quick "prototyping" language with lots of power and few rules. The idea behind Scotch is to create a language with the readability and syntax of Python, but replacing support for object oriented programming (completely, to discourage its use) with functional tools such as lazy evaluation and recursion.

I'm trying also to deal with some common complaints about functional languages. For example, there is a simple print statement, and the syntax looks very similar to Python, although there are differences behind the scenes. Also, functions and variables can be defined more than once, so variables are capable of incrementing, although the default assignment is lazy so too much reliance on state is discouraged. And duck typing, one of the features which makes scripting languages so convenient, is also available.

The interpreter works, although you couldn't do much with it just yet. You can check it out on the Scotch page at Google Code.

Hopefully I'll be able to implement some more features to make it usable before I get too busy with next semester's classes.