Contents
Update News
Overview and Features
Design of XLSE
Downloading XLSE
In The News
March 16, 2008
To make Open Source people happier, I am re-releasing XLSE under the GPL v2. See the link at the bottom of this page for the updated download.
October 9, 2006
I have made the XLSE source code available for download. The interpreter seems quite stable at this point. I have added numerous features in the last few weeks which made it alot more usable than it was before. The distribution comes with a compiled windows binary, so windows people can try it as it is. It also includes a Visual C++ project file and a Linux makefile. So far it compiles flawlessly and without changes in both Visual C++ and G++.
May 17, 2006
I will soon be making XLSE available for download, with source code. I will probably distribute it under the GPL, or an LGPL type of license. This should allow many people to benefit from it. I can see some potential in the area of game development.
Overview and Features
XLSE is entirely programmed in C++, from scratch. It uses zero external libraries outside of what the C++ standard provides. Some of its features include:- Interactive mode (as shown below)
- Parsing of script files
- Support for C and C++ style comments (also nested c-style multiline comments)
- Fast one-pass parser (coded by hand, no flex/yacc/bison)
- Proper mark-sweep garbage collection (can be disabled, configurable)
- Can define custom language primitives in C++
- Can define external functions/macros in C++ that scripts may call
- Easy access to script data from C++
- Support for vectors, in addition to lists
- Elementary LISP dialect implementation provided, can be fully overriden/reimplemented
- Built-in support for integers floating-point values
- Stack tracing system for easier debugging
- Currently implementing modules/packages
- Zero dependencies outside the standard C++, 100% portable!
Design Philosophy of XLSE
The features of XLSE are very basic, it is a bare-bones lisp I implemented as a "pet project". The main goal was for it to be very easily extended. It's lightweight, has no dependencies on anything outside of standard C++, so it should compile anywhere. It's not fast because the implementation is rather naive, but the nice thing about it is that absolutely everything in the language can be redefined. Things like "if", "while", "define", etc, are not special forms in XLSE, but host-defined macros. This means you can code your own versions of all of these in C++ directly should you want to. You can also easily make your own types for use in the language, and define new functions in the language that can operate on those new types. The whole idea of XLSE is that it's inherently LISP, but the language really becomes what you make out of it, your own LISP dialect. It does not impose any conventions on you.
Downloading XLSE
Click on the link below to download the XLSE distribution:
xlse.zip (226 KB)