cdiggins.com

A new beta release of the Cat interpreter (version 0.10.0) is now available through Google code open source project hosting. This is basically Google’s answer to SourceForge.net, minus the confusing interface and annoying ads. I am very pleased with this new offering from Google.

I have taken the time to redo a lot of the underlying parsing code, and how primitives are dealt with internally. I even have a cool functional list class that I am also very proud of. The new parsing library is a general purpose PEG (Parsing Expression Grammar) recursive descent parser. The real power of the new library is how you can write code that very closely matches the grammar of the Cat language, making it easy to make changes to the library.

I designed the PEG parsing library to be easily reused in other projects, so please feel free to do so (it is public domain code after all). I’d love to hear about any succesful uses of the library.

Some may argue that the greatest feature of the new Cat interpreter is the automatic conversion to point-free form. This is done using a very small module called: CatPointFreeForm.cs.  

This release is not yet as thoroughly tested as previous releases, and many of the original primitives haven’t yet been reimplemented, so if you’d prefer to wait for a more stable release, the 0.10.1 version should be available in a couple of days. Hopefully by then, the documentation will also match the new changes to the language.

There is now also an issue/bug tracking system for Cat at http://code.google.com/p/cat-language/issues/list.