Are you a VB developer curious about functional-first programming. F# is a statically typed language built into Visual Studio. It is a multi-paradigm language with both functional and object-oriented constructs. F# has powerful type inference which reduces the amount of typing you need to do without reducing performance or correctness. F# projects are easily referenced from VB and vice versa. Like VB, F# makes minimal use of curly braces, and for many operations the syntax will feel quite familiar. H[...]

C# is a mainstream programming language based on Java, that runs on Windows via .Net and cross platform via Mono. On .Net , C# is used primarily in the enterprise for web and desktop applications. With Mono, C# can target a range of popular platforms including iOS and Andriod, and is primarily employed in mobile application development via Xamarin’s tools and game development via Unity. Microsoft’s current shipping C# compiler is proprietary code written in C++. Mono’s C# compiler, is open source and writ[...]

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been building my own parser, interpreter and compiler for Small Basic, a dialect of BASIC with only 14 keywords aimed at beginners. Despite, or perhaps because of, Small Basic’s simplicity some really fun programs have been developed, from games like Tetris and 3D Maze to a parser for the language itself. Small Basic provides primitive types for numbers, strings and associative arrays. There is no syntax provided for structures, but these can be easily modelled with the [...]

Microsoft Small Basic is a minimal implementation of the BASIC language aimed at beginners, with only 14 keywords. A few years back I used Small Basic as an early introduction to programming for my 2 young children (at the time 9 and 5). Small Basic’s library has a nice simple API for drawing shapes and moving a turtle around the screen which the kids loved. However I found the lack of function arguments and return values was quite limiting from a teaching perspective. After creating shapes we wanted to [...]

Small Basic, from Microsoft Dev Labs, is a minimal implementation of BASIC, employing only 14 keywords, aimed at beginners. In the last 2 articles I described building an internal DSL and parser to build an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the program with an interpreter for execution. In this article I’ll describe how to transform the AST to executable .Net IL code, thus building a compiler. Small Basic is an imperative programming language where programs are built up of procedures containing[...]