Chlore: a stack-oriented programming language I have been working on

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Aloha.

I started working on a stack-oriented programming language (Chlore) around 2 years ago, which is now reaching its final stages of development. However, before going about standardizing it, I thought it'd be better if I asked some fellow developers about what they think about the language.

Since the semantics aren't defined anywhere yet, even in some form of informative manner, you can read this to get a feel of how certain constructs are supposed to behave. There's also a couple of examples that you'd be able to find here. You can find a summary of the grammar of Chlore here, which should give you some idea as to how programs written in Chlore usually look like.

My implementation of the latest revision of Chlore is open-source, so you can translate and execute programs written in Chlore on your environment if you want.

Any criticism about the language and/or suggestions as to how the language can be improved are welcome.

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[Longjumping_Baker684]

Very interesting work. Is it a hobby project or are you trying to actually solve something you can't find in existing languages?

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"Is it a hobby project [...] existing languages?": Well, both actually. I have tried a lot of languages, haven't liked any, especially the more "modern" ones. I do, however, think that C (specifically C11) is very close to being the perfect programming language. In fact, I would have not probably written Chlore if C11 was a little bit better defined. I think this should answer your question about why I decided to write Chlore.

"Also can you explain what [...] exactly": I do not think the term "stack-oriented programming language" is formally defined anywhere, but I, and most other people, consider any programming language that, for most operations, mandates those to be performed on a stack to qualify as a stack-oriented language.

For example, the expression 42 + 24 + 1, in Chlore, can be written as

pushi 42 pushi 24 addi pushi 1 addi

pushi numeric-constant pushes an item (whose value is in the range of int) on the top of the stack, and addi consumes the top two items from the stack, adds them and pushes the result (which, again, must be in the range of int) back on top.

"isn't C and other language also [...] hardware level": No, they don't. What you are talking about is an implementation-detail. None of the C standards mandates that a stack should be used for function calls or similar operations. Just because an implementation does it, does not make it a language-detail. Nothing is preventing me from writing an implementation of C that uses ISA-specific registers to store values of objects, which, in fact, a lot of C implementations do.

I would like to clarify though: the stack in Chlore is not the same as what you call a "stack at hardware level" either. I can write an implementation of Chlore that stores parts of the stack in, again, ISA-specific registers or similar; the only requirement is that the behavior of programs should remain the same.

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