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Oblock

Oblock is a prototype-based object-oriented language about generalisation.

Features

Inspired by Lua and Io, Oblock seeks to further reduce the number of different concepts in a language by (over)generalising features together. These are Oblock's main features / selling points:

Blocks are objects

This unifies the creation of objects and the assignment of variables. Now you can perform computations when creating objects!

a = {
    x = 21
    y = 2*x
}
print(a.y) --> 42

List literals are also blocks: (although assignment syntax works a little differently)

a = [16, x = 42, (if true: -x), 32]
print(a.1, a.x) --> 16, 42
print(a) --> [16, -42, 32]

If you were wondering, this is what led to the name (object + block = Oblock).

Prototypal OOP

Also notice the easy operator overloading by just assigning a function to the string field "+".

Vector = {
    "+" that => this.clone {
        x = this.x + that.x
        y = this.y + that.y
    }
}

v = Vector.clone {
    x = 10
    y = 20
}

print(v + v) --> { x = 20; y = 40 }

A grain of FP

Definitions are constant by default and are separate from assignments. Use var to define a new variable and := to assign to an existing one.

map = fn => list => {
    new = []
    for x in list: new.append(fn x)
    return new
}

l = map (x => x+1) [10, 20, 30]
print l --> [11, 21, 31]

Examples

Reading input

IO = import "Io"
for word in IO.stdin.splitAt " ": print(word.toString().length)

For more examples of Oblock, have a look at the files in the src/test/ directory.

Installation

You can give Oblock a spin:

  1. Clone the repository (git clone https://github.com/Dantevg/Oblock)
  2. Install Lua if you haven't already
  3. From the src/lua/ directory, run ./oblock.lua and type away!

VS Code language extension

There is a VS Code extension that provides syntax highlighting. You can find it here: https://github.com/Dantevg/Oblock-vscode. It's not yet on the marketplace, but you can install it manually by downloading the latest version from the releases page and running code --install-extension oblock-language-0.0.3.vsix.

REPL

To enable the REPL, run Oblock with the --interactive or -i parameter. Each line is interpreted as an expression. To assign variables at the top-level, you can wrap assignments in parentheses:

> (hey := "hello")
> hey
hello

Status and roadmap

Oblock is currently still very much in development and the design is not yet final. Most basic features are complete, but the language is missing some key features. These are the features that are still to come, roughly in order:

  • I/O with streams
  • proper module system
  • standard library
  • error handling
  • coroutines
  • parallelism

The notes/ directory contains some files with notes. Please keep in mind that most of those files are old and I haven't updated them in a while. notes.md is the most active notes file, but that also still has some old ideas and out-of-date information the further down you go. These notes were also primarily meant for my later self (this repo was private until very recent, depending on when you read this), so some may not even make sense to you. They may also show you how much I don't know what I'm doing, but oh well!