C-Sic

Hi all,

Just wanted to post something I was working on for fun. It's a kind of language translator. It takes a basic kind of dialect (much akin to Blitz, and translates it into c++).

So if the look of C++ makes you sick, I give you C-Sic.



Heh heh.

It compiles using MinGW and works quite well, albeit a bit limited atm.

cool. How far are you going to take this?

It's been a bit 'Here and there' over the last few weeks.

I'd like to get to the point where I could write a proper project in it.

At the moment the basic parsing works quite well. It understands, functions, if statements, select statements, structure and unions, but no classes yet. My C++ is a little rusty after all these years, so I'm re-learning it as I go :)

So far I haven't hit anything I can't handle, but am working my way through c++ tutorials, reverse engineering the translator to be able to create the examples as I go.

I would like many of the complexities to be handled by the editor (includes etc.) to keep the actual code as clean as possible. I'll post a working demo here once I have something worth playing with.

I to am learning C++ again, basically I want a set of libraries that are as good as Max so I can write me own System Shock 2 game in it :D

Currently I am wondering how to deal with case sensitivity. I wanted to make it case insensitive. Currently I make all identifiers lower case, but wondering how this will jibe with header file. Any suggestions?

How do you handle variables or functions that exist in C++?

i.e. if you were to create a variable called cout.

Currently I don't. The idea is to get C++ without the faffy syntax. Cout is under the std namespace (if I recall). How it works is to look for basic contructs and replace these with C++ constructs. Anything not recognised is passed to the C++ output. This would allow 'Pure C++' blocks to be marked out by:

BeginC

EndC

Or something like that. Anything between these delimiters would be passed to the C++ output unaltered.

Of course if you couldn't link to libraries or use external headers, then the system wouldn't be much use. This is why I am concerned about the case thing.

Would pre-processing the header files and making all the identifiers lower case solve the problem do you think. Are external functions case sensitive?

I didn't actually mean that you were writing in C++ just, what would happen if you had a variable or function that coincidentally exists as a C++ function?

it would return the same error that the c++ compiler would pass back. I tried it and it complains that cout cannot accept the << binary operator. :/

So no smart aliasing 8D

if someone wanted to draw an image they would still have to learn opengl though right?

Thats why I stick to blitzmax - also good collision commands

Depends really. It could interface with the Blitz3D SDK or any other libraries I expect. It seems we'd all like something as fast as C++ with all the power it gives us, but without the complexity of the language.

To some extent it makes sense to have a 'inbetween' compiler to hide the complexity, while letting the back end c++ compiler take care of the optimisation.

As I said, it a fun side project at the moment :)

Hey, make it translate BlitzMax into Objective C ;-0