Wipple Weekly Update

I worked a lot on Wipple over the past week — here’s what’s new!

Changed block syntax

To make room for modules, blocks now use square brackets ([]) instead of curly braces:

three : [
   1
   2
   3
]

Modules

Modules encapsulate their environment, allowing you to declare variables in a particular scope. Modules are declared using module blocks (which take the {} syntax from regular blocks):

module : {
    variable : "Hello"
}

variable won’t be accessible outside of the module. If you want to access a variable inside a module, you can call the module as a function, passing the desired name as input:

module variable -- "Hello"

Alternatively, you can use a module to bring all of its variables (as well as any other items in the captured environment, like conformances) into the current environment:

use module
variable -- "Hello"

Project management

Project management is now implemented, so you can split code across multiple files. To create a project, add a project.wpl file in the root folder containing a main variable:

-- project.wpl

main : "main"

The provided string represents the path to the main file of the project, relative to project.wpl.

-- main.wpl

show "Hello, world!"

Just run wipple run in your terminal to run the project:

$ wipple run
Hello, world!

You can also import and use other files anywhere in your project. For example, you could use the code in hello.wpl from main.wpl:

-- hello.wpl

hello : "Hello, world!"

-- main.wpl

use "hello" -- or "./hello"

show hello

Currently project.wpl only supports main, but support for dependencies and other configuration options will be implemented soon.

Removed binary operators

Variadic operators can do everything binary operators can, and binary operators were causing some problems in the parser (eg. 2 + 2 + 2 would be evaluated to 4). Therefore, binary operators have been removed entirely.

Codebase organization

The Wipple codebase has been reorganized, merging everything into one repository for easier debugging and maintenance. Builds of the interpreter are also now released automatically, and some tests of language semantics have been added.

---

This week, I’ll be focusing less on the core language and more on porting our robotics team’s Botball library to Wipple. Check back here next week for another update!