stacky

WIP stack-based compiled concatenative programming language.

Currently is developement is postponed, due to other projects (and university) with higher priority.

It's somewhere between B and C programming languages in universe where B was stack based concatenative language.

Features

• Turing completness
• Optional type checking
• Low level OS access ability

Example

hello, world

# hello.stacky
"io" import

"hello, world" puts nl

$ stacky run hello.stacky
hello, world

puts current date

# date.stacky
"io"   import
"time" import

"Date is " puts

now  # returns seconds in Unix time
date # returns year, month, day, hours, minutes
	   putu "-" puts
	2 aputu "-" puts
	2 aputu " " puts
	2 aputu ":" puts
	2 aputu nl

$ stacky run date.stacky
Date is 2021-10-17 23:13

Language reference

Control flow

if ... else ... end

Consumes top of the stack. If value was nonzero, executes if branch, otherwise else branch.

"io" import
10 if "value is 10!" else "value is not 10 :c" end puts nl

while ... do ... end

While condition part (between while and do) is nonzero, executes repeatadly loop part (between do and end).

# puts numbers from 0 to 10
"io" import

0 while dup 11 = ! do
	dup .
	1 +
end

Functions

<name> fun <code> end creates function with given name and code block.

"io" import

say-hello fun "Hi, " puts puts "!\n" puts end

"Mark" say-hello # prints "Hi, Mark!"

Address of functions

&<name> puts <name> address onto stack, for example: &foo

Call operator

call calls function pointed by address on top of the stack.

"Mark" &say-hello call

Standard library

algorithm

• uniform32 - (a b -- n) returns random integer n in range [a, b]

io

• nl - putss newline to stdout
• puts - (pointer --) - prints null terminated string to stdout
• . - (uint --) - puts unsigned integer to stdout with a newline at the end

limits

• Max_Digits10 - (-- uint) - returns maximum number of decimal digits that unsigned integer may have

time

• now - (-- seconds) - returns number of seconds since Unix time

• sleep - (seconds --) - sleeps given number of seconds

• date - (seconds -- year month day hours minutes) - decomposes seconds since Unix time into human readable form

• +minutes - (minutes seconds -- seconds) - adds minutes to seconds

• +hours - (hours seconds -- seconds) - adds hours to seconds

• +days - (days seconds -- seconds) - adds days to seconds

• +weeks - (weekds seconds -- seconds) - adds weeks to seconds

• -minutes - (minutes seconds -- seconds) - subtracts minutes from seconds

• -hours - (hours seconds -- seconds) - subtracts hours from seconds

• -days - (days seconds -- seconds) - subtracts days from seconds

• -weeks - (weekds seconds -- seconds) - subtracts weeks from seconds

posix

Contains definition of constants related to POSIX compatible operating systems.

• SYS_<syscall> - constants holding syscall numbers, like SYS_exit = 60
• stdin, stdout, stderr
• CLOCK_<type> - definition of clocks constants for clock_gettime syscall

Makefile

• make install-nvim - installs Stacky's syntax highlighting for Neovim
• make stacky - makes only compiler
• make test - runs all tests
• make clean - cleans all intermidiate files

Requirements

• NASM
• LD
• GCC with C++ compiler for compiler and stdlib compilation
• Boost Program_Options

For Arch-based users:

pacman -S gcc binutils nasm boost

See also

• Tsoding Porth (main inspiration for starting this project)
• Classic stack based language Forth
• Modern stack based functional language Factor