The HackC Programming Lauguage
Table of contents.
The HackC programming language is designed to be the last C-derived language. It's basic premiss is that no one can ever finish C, so instead we need a language that allows C to be extended in any possible way. HackC is that language.
HackC compiles C programs and programs that have extensions added to C. The output of the HackC compiler is a legal C program. Almost any possible language construct that can be reduced to a C implementation is possible in HackC. For example, C++ can be supported as a HackC library extension to C. Other possible extensions include garbage collection and functional programming.
HackC is a C-like language. That means that compiled programs are generally fast. HackC compilers are also generally fast. There are several properties of C that are maintained in all HackC implementations and extensions:
There are also three key extensions to C that HackC allow:
By allowing new syntax to be added to HackC compilers, any strictly C-derived language can be parsed. Plug-in tools allow the compiler to support the new constructs. Restrictions on syntax allow HackC extensions to be a sub-set of C in various ways. For example, it's possible to eliminate support for pointers and goto statements in a particular HackC extension.
A HackC compiler is built using a C compiler. A HackC compiler is just a C library that conforms to the HackC API. User extensions to a HackC compiler are just C files that get compiled and linked with the HackC library.
However, most HackC extensions are actually written in HackC, and then transformed into C by the HackC compiler in order to be linked into the HackC compiler. Thus, HackC is extendable directly in HackC.
Bison and flex are considered part of the HackC language in the following sense: HackC source files may provide rules that get transformed into legal .y and .l files. These files are then converted into C with bison and flex, and compiled with the rest of the C generated by the HackC compiler.
A HackC compiler has the following phases:
Identifier binding and type propagation are done with lazy evaluation, to help reduce bugs and development effort.
Plug-in tools do all of the semantic checking and code transformations. The phases of a plug-in tool are applied in a sequence determined by tool inter-dependencies.
Extensions to HackC are done through a simple application programming interface (API). In other words, a HackC compiler is really just a C library and a header file that provide a functional interface to manipulation of HackC language constructs.
Through the API, all HackC language constructs are manipulated as simple lists. There are only three kinds of objects:
zScope
zIdent
zList
zAtom
The zList class is used to represent a HackC parse-tree. All zIdent objects are owned by zScope objects representing identifier scopes. The zAtom class represents values such as strings and identifiers.
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