Category Archives: Language Design

It is traditional to divide the parsing of a program into two conceptually separate stages – the lexical analysis which extracts a stream of tokens from a stream of characters, and the grammar matching stage which gathers those tokens into … Continue reading →

I was going to start out by describing the lexical structure of Ocean, but as I thought more about it, I realised there was something that needed to come first.  And that something is literate programming. Literate programming is the … Continue reading →

“The naming of cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games.”  The naming of programming languages is also important.  As with any project a name is needed to be able to refer to, and it … Continue reading →

When I was doing my honours year in Computer Science (UNSW, 1986) I wanted to design a new programming language.  That would be a rather large project for an honours year and naturally it didn’t happen.  I have remained interested … Continue reading →