Okay. Umm. Do you have example source code for that? I think I get what you are saying, but I'm not entirely sure. Also, will this be  GNU, GPL, or something else?

If you're going to write a serious compiler, it's pretty much a prerequisite to read the Dragon book. I've found it to be really good at explaining a lot of the techniques and difficulties in building a compiler.

Two things, I would like to be involved more directly, however, I do not have a Facebook account and will not be getting one any time soon (of my own vocation I might add). But I check my email almost daily. Send anything to there.

FYI, this discussion has moved almost entirely to Cemetech.net , So if anyone wants to participate further, I recommend either going there or emailing me at [email protected]

I think crossposting stuff is better to make the project more popular, why the full move to Cemetech?

You should involve the community for testing later. Also example programs would help .

I'm a bit late but I think Nanowar and Ephan points are that it's generally considered a bad practice for a forum member to constantly advertise his own site (or another) on someone else's instead of directly posting updates or copying them there, especially when you only have 10 posts. From a bunch of older member's perspective, this might look like the posts author is trying to use Omnimaga and Cemetech primarily to lure members for his site rather than getting project feedback and this might tarnish his reputation. This isn't to mention that some people are under parental control and may not be able to visit other specific sites.

On the old Omnimaga board, there was a rule disallowing forum members to advertise their own calculator site (except if they got permission) unless they had at least 2000 posts.

Hi shkaboinka. I was talking to Homer-16 on XBox one day and he told me about OPIA. I decided to look it up and I must say: it looks very promising. I admire the syntax you've come up with as it is not overly complex, and elegant. I especially like your implementation of anonymous functions. All in all, though, nice work.

I haven't read all of the Cemetech conversation, but do you happen to have an ETA for some kind of an alpha or beta release?

A random list of points discussed previously on other forums (modified):

BOOLEANS - Booleans are a whole byte because it takes extra instructions to extract/insert just one bit, which adds more than just another byte to the program just for using it; so it actually saves space that way.

MEMORY MANAGEMENT - No Garbage collector will be built-in. However, functions can be written which will enable the "new" (and "delete") operators for the language. The idea is that any kind of memory management can be plugged in (whether coded manually, or already part of the platform/OS). As for static allocations, there are preprocessor directives whuch can be used to signify sections of "same RAM" which the compiler will use for larger things that lack initialization values.

VIRTUAL FUNCTIONS - I was originally going to have the compiler just KNOW when functions should be virtual/late-bound because of the overridden definitions (like Java). However, requiring one to explicitly say which functions are virtual (like C#/C++) means that a the internal representation of a class can be determined without having to look at other code. This is important because OPIA allows you to specify an address where something is already stored (e.g. precompiled or otherwise already existing) rather than allocating space for it otherwise.

ENVIRONMENT DEPENDENCIES - If a program is completely generic (i.e. nothing platform-specific), then it will run anywhere (directly on the bare hardware). Standard representations of functions, arrays, etc. also allow things to be picked out explicitly and used with new code. The whole compilation process is going to be very modularized, such that it can be used an API by other tools (e.g. an IDE which uses the compiler itself to highlight syntax and find errors, but without doing a full compile).

FEATURES - OPIA will ONLY include features which would be difficult to do with the language otherwise, which can be implemented using close to the same overhead NECESSARY as if done manually, and which do not add unnecessary complexity to the language. For example, I was going to have classes & interfaces (I will post more about that later) because one would HAVE to use late-bound functions and virtual tables to simulate that anyway; but I have even replaced classes & inheritance with structs and simpler interfaces because it makes the language simpler, adds more power/flexibility, and provides a much closer representation of the underlying mechanisms used. OPIA will NOT include operator overloading, bounds-checks (or any built-in error handling), excpetions, or assertions (though interpreted aspects can be used to compile code dynamically). I was going to provide parametric types (using type-erasure, since that provides a single representation for each thing); but with the new Go-style interfaces, OPIA might be fine without them ... maybe in the future, but I'm not promising it.

VALUE PASSING - Always pass-by-value. I was going to provide reference-types, which use pointers internally, but now that I've switched to a simpler Go-like setup, one can just use pointers directly as needed.

NAMING - I really do not see what it wrong with the name "OPIA" (except for the similar spelling to "opium"); but the only other name suggested so far that I even like at all was "Candu" (Malay for "opium"). No Z++, because there are too many letters and pluses and sharps etc. already. No "TI" anything, because it will run on ANY z80 machine (though heck yes, TI's are the focus) ... but seriously, is "OPIA" such a bad name? (Object-oriented Pre-Interpreted Antidisassemblage ... though admittedly, the Go-style is polymorphic and object-based without being truely object-oriented in the traditional sense).