Getting Started

Dependency

Start a new project in your favourite IDE and give it a name. I've called mine Aardvark for no particular reason. In most cases your project should have been created with either a build.gradle (Gradle) or pom.xml (Maven) file in the root directory. These represent build automation tools and to which we'll need to add the following dependency:

No build file

If your project does not contain a build file then you may have created a blank project. I'd recommend to either re-create the project and selecting Gradle or Maven, or using one of the starter projects.

build.gradle

dependencies {
    implementation 'dev.larf:larf-core:0.89'
}

pom.xml

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>dev.larf</groupId>
        <artifactId>larf-core</artifactId>
        <version>0.89</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

A projects structure can differ depending on your chosen build tool / IDE, but it should have a structure similar to the following:

[gradle]
[src]
   [main]
       [java]
           [com.aardvark]
               Application.java
   [test]
        ... 
build.gradle
gradlew
gradlew.bat
settings.gradle

Configuration

The first thing to do will be to create a configuration file. This is where all your tokens, operators and properties are defined which determine how your language will look and operate. We'll first add a config folder to the structure and put our new class in that:

[src]
   [main]
       [java]
           [com.aardvark]
               [config]
                   AardvarkConfig.java
               Application.java

Extending our class from LARFConfig will require us to implement several methods:

public class AardvarkConfig extends LARFConfig {

  @Override
  protected void initTokenHandlers() { }

  @Override
  protected void initFunctions() { }

  @Override
  protected TypeOperation initTypeOperations() { retuurn null; }

  @Override
  protected void initOperators() { }

  @Override
  protected void initParserFormatters() { }
}

Don't worry about the content of these methods as we'll get to these in due time.

Runner

Next we'll modify the existing Application.java file in the root of the project directory. We'll change it to extend another class called LARFRunner* and define the following in the main method:

public class Application extends LARFRunner {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    AardvarkConfig config = new AardvarkConfig();
    LARFProcessor processor = new LARFProcessor(config);
    run("Aardvark Language", processor);
  }
}

Runner class

The LARFRunner utility class is runnable allowing you to write, evaluate and test code in your language.

Run the application and you'll be presented with the following:

Aardvark Language Test Utility
==============================

From here you'll be able to evaluate expressions and debug your code. Now that we have the basics sorted, let's get started writing our language.