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GLS - General Language Syntax

A single syntax that compiles into your favorite OOP languages.

Theory

Most object-oriented programming glanguages today are "pretty much" the same. Declaring variables, PEMDAS operations, calling functions, and so on rarely change; the base concept of a compiled or scripting language with managed memory is very common.

GLS provides a common syntax to describe programming functionality in these common managed languages. .gls files can be compiled into any of the supported languages, and will work somewhat approximately the same in all of them.

Syntax

Each line in GLS consits of a function, a colon, and any number of arguments, all separated by spaces.

print line : "GLS!"
  • Function: print
  • Argument: "GLS!"

print line : GLS will compile to System.Console.WriteLine("GLS!") in C#, print("GLS!)", console.log("GLS!") in TypeScript, and so on.

Parenthesis

You can keep spaces inside your arguments by wrapping characters in parenthesis. This tells the compiler to treat the space as part of the argument instead of a separator.

print line : ("Hello world!")

  • Function: print

  • Argument: "Hello world!"

Recursion

Languages would be pretty useless if you could only do one command each line. To pipe the output of one command, into another, use {} brackets to wrap the inner command.

print line : { operation : 1 plus 2 }

Tidbits

  • Each GLS command is idempotent - it doesn't know or care about any preceding or following commands.

  • Commands return information on whitespace to the compiler, so indentation in generated files is semantically correct.

Status

Deliverable Version Date Description
C++ compiler 0.1 May 2015 Command-line GLS prototype, written in C++
TypeScript compiler 0.2 July 2015 GLS compiler as a website, written in TypeScript
Dogfooded C# compiler 0.3 March 2016 GLS compiling itself into itself (meta!); tested in C#
Ruby, Python, and Java support 0.4 April 2016 Dogfood working correctly in all three languages
PowerShell, PHP, JavaScript, and misc. 0.5 May 2016 Dogfood or reject those languages
Language specification finalized 0.6 June 2016 Finalized language spec & cleaned internals of code
General release 1.0 July 2016

Intentionally Missing Features

No language is perfect. The following are some seemingly obvious omissions in GLS that are due to languages not supporting them:

Feature C# Java Python Ruby TypeScript
Foreach Over Values Missing!
Multiline Lambdas Missing!
Optional Parameters Missing!
String.Replace Abnormal!
Switch Statements Missing!

This list will grow as features are requested.