CESIL, or Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language, is a programming language designed to introduce pupils in British secondary schools to elementary computer programming. It is a simple language containing a total of fourteen instructions.
Ladies and gentlemen, CESIL time. That's right, I did it again! And this time it works (maybe).
47 years later, introducing a brand new, fast, epic cesil compiler.
There is currently no binary build for macos. That is because linux -> mac cross-compilation fails with some long and chaotic error message and It would be super complicated to fix and I don't want to have to read the Xcode license and I'm sure it would make me give all my copyright rights to Apple [...]
There are installation scripts in the releases.
I was not able to find any official specifictions, so I had to go mainly by the wikipedia article. When it was first created, cesil was punched onto punch cards. This means that the syntax written in a text file on a computer must be modified a little. Here is what I did:
- You are not forced to use columns
- If a line starts with
(, it is a comment - Empty lines and comments are ingored
- If a line starts with an identifier, then the first word is considered a label, word 2 is condidered the command and word 3 (if it exists) is considered the argument
- If the line starts with a whitespace, the first word is considered the command and the second one the argument
This means that the following program:
LOAD +0
LOOP STORE TOTAL
UIN
JINEG DONE
ADD TOTAL
JUMP LOOP
DONE PRINT "The total is: "
LOAD TOTAL
OUT
LINE
HALT
is just as valid as
LOAD +0
LOOP STORE TOTAL
UIN
JINEG DONE
ADD TOTAL
JUMP LOOP
DONE PRINT "The total is: "
LOAD TOTAL
OUT
LINE
HALT
Data section starts with % and ends with *
The compiler will detect the target you want from the output file extension.
- C (.c)
- native binaries (No extension [linux]/.app [MacOS]/.exe [Shitdows])
- Bash (.sh)
- JavaScript (.js)
- PHP
- Java
- APKs (using java)
- Batch files (MS-DOS compatible)
- Currently only works in browser
- You include the build script in the browser using
<script src="your-script.js">and then usewindow.CESIL_RUN(...) - If you give the
CESIL_RUNfunction a function as an argument (egwindow.CESIL_RUN(x => console.log(">" + x))), that function will be used for logging. If you give it a query selector (egwindow.CESIL_RUN('#output')), it will put output into the selected element. - You can define
window.CESIL_LINE_ENDto set a custom line break string. - Feel free to use the code from test.html
The line delimeter (\n for terminal, < br > for browser) is determined by if interactive mode is on. If you want to compile for terminal without interactive mode, change the line 8 of your compilation result to say
$LINE = "\n";Dm me on discord if you want to request a compilation target!
- This implementation covers 100% of cesil api.
- A new instruction is added:
UIN, this reads a number from stdin and saves it to the accumulator. This is for interactivness of your binaries and won't compile unless you use the interactive flag.
Run cesilc --help to get cli usage information.
CesilC has its own preprocessor! It currently only has one command: #include filename
Do not enclose the file name in "
( Correct
#include source.ces
( Wrong
#include "source.ces"
- Catch some errors at compilation time
- Error handeling so the compiler doesnt ever crash
- More compilation targets
- ...
If you have any questions or want to contact me for any reason, add me on discord: danik#4985
You can make your own compilation targets, just have a look at the source.
You can use make_release.sh to generate binaries for all platforms.
This program uses the GPLv3 license. See its full text in the COPYING file!
Cesil compiler/transpiler
Copyright (C) 2022 danik4985
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
- Compilation to mac and shitdows binaries isn't tested. In case it doesnt work, compile to c source and use your compiler to compile that. (And report it to issues).
- To compile to binaries, you need to have
gccinstalled. - If you encounter any problems, please report them in the issues tab.
- If you enjoy this project, I would be very happy if you starred it (so that more people see it.) ⭐