Another month, another language: pi

[jducoeur]

The latest programming language to come to my attention is rather neat: in the pi language, the entire focus is on declaring patterns -- EBNF-style declarations of syntax, and their associated meanings. See the linked page for a little more info and some cool (if simple) examples of how easy it is to define new syntax in this language.

My initial reaction is that it's a bit scary, and almost certainly *much* too easy to completely hang yourself (I'd love to see what you could do with an obfuscated-code contest in this language), but also quite powerful for certain sorts of problems. Probably extremely well-suited to defining DSLs and the like, once it gets more mature...

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Interesting that they don't handle English all that well in their description, unless this is some dialect of programmer-ese of which I'm unaware.

π technically is a fully reflective dynamically both semantically and syntactically extensible programming language....

Interesting nest of adverbs there.

In addition to that, with π we provide a clean and easy mean for the design of new (experimental) languages

A mean? I don't think they intend to say that their language is average.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Reminds me somewhat of Valentin Turchin's Refal language, which my father told me about when he was taking a course from Dr. Turchin twenty-mumble years ago. It was described at the time as "a language for writing languages".

If C is an implementation of the von Neumann architecture, and Lisp & Scheme are implementations of Alonzo Church's lambda-calculus, these languages can be thought of as implementations of Emil Post's production rules.