Peter Newman 9 January 2005 ---------------------- Unified Programming Language
The language parsers are what parse and run the program scripts.
Obviously, each language (Perl, Tcl, C, etc) or variant thereof has it's own parser/interpreter.
One defect with current versions of Tcl and Perl, is that the parser/interpreter parses and then immediately executes the source code. I know that's not totally true; there's an intermediate byte-code step in between. But in effect it's what happens.
The problem with this is that it makes writing compilers, syntax checkers and language convertors etc very difficult. Because every such tool not only has to compile and syntax check (or whatever it does), it first has to parse the source code - interpreting it exactly as the real parser does.
This is by no means an easy thing to do.
So UPL divides the whole parsing and execution thing up. There is:-
- The Parser - which parses the source code - and converts into a stream of tokens - probably in tree format - that describes the commands/objects and their arguments found. That tokenised form of the program can then be passed directly to one of the tools below - or saved to disk for processing/analysis later.
- The Byte Code Compiler - which converts the tokenised source code into byte-code form - which can be either saved to disk for later execution - or executed directly.
- The Executioner - which executes the byte code - received either on-the-fly from the byte-code compiler - or read in from a file on disk.
- The C Dumper - which converts the tokenised form of the program into C code - which can then be compiled.
And then there are some optional things:-
- The Reverse Parser - which converts the tokenised form of the program back into source code form.
- The Reverse Byte Code Compiler - which converts byte code back into tokenised form.
- The Obfuscator - which converts the variable and function names in the tokenised form of the program into meaningless trash - and then calls the Reverse Parser to convert this (hopefully now incomprehensible mess) back into source code form.
- The Language Translators - If different languages were able to share the same tokenised and/or byte code forms - then automatically translating between them becomes possible.
- The Syntax Checker - which analyses the tokenised form of the program.
-- PWQ 10 Jan 05 I would suggest a Tree Executioner to eliminate the need to have a bytecode compiler.