New Expressions and Statements in Basic Storm

This part of the tutorial shows how to create syntax extensions to Basic Storm. We will implement two relatively simple extensions. The first one is a loop-like repeat block that simply executes the loop body a certain number of times: 

repeat(10) {
    print("Test");
}

The second one is a simple map-like construct (limited to integers for simplicity): 

Int[] input = [1, 2, 3];
Int[] output = map(x * 2 for x in input);

There are a number of different ways in which these two extensions can be implemented. This tutorial illustrates two of them. The first, and perhaps easiest, is to implement these new constructs in terms of Basic Storm and thereby rely on Basic Storm's ability to generate code. The second one, that might be a slightly more involved, is to generate code in the Intermediate Language directly. Since this approach does not rely on Basic Storm, it is not limited by the abilities of Basic Storm.

As with the other tutorials, the code produced by this tutorial is available in root/tutorials/expressions. You can run it by typing tutorials:expressions:main in the Basic Storm top loop. Since we are implementing two versions of the same constructs, the structure of the aforementioned directory differs slightly from the one suggested by the tutorial. Namely, the two implementations are in different subdirectories so that they can coexist, and so that it is possible to decide which one to use.

Setup

First, we need somewhere to work. Create an empty directory somewhere on your system. The name does not matter too much, but the remainder of the tutorial assumes that it is expressions. If you pick another name, you need to modify the package names in use statements.

Create two subdirectories inside the directory you just created: repeat and map. We will place the two extensions inside these directories. This is so that we can create a main function that uses the extensions in a separate package from the extension itself. It is usually not a good idea to define and use a language extension in the same package, as that easily creates dependency cycles that are difficult to resolve.

Finally, create a file named test.bs (or some other name) inside the expressions directory. Start by adding a definition of a main function as below: 

void main() {
}

We will use this function to write tests later on. After all of this, open a terminal and navigate to the newly created directory. This makes it possible to run the code we will write by typing: 

storm .

If done successfully, this will not produce any output, and Storm will exit successfully.

Tutorials

To help with readability, this tutorial is split into four pieces: