The Pongo Programming Language

Version b1.0

Pongo is a simple, 16-bit toy programming language. An initial proof-of-concept was written in pure C, with the latest version being written in Go. The language is inherently non-structured (similar to TinyBASIC), and relies heavily on bitwise operations.

This language is still being actively worked on- the beta I have released so far is just the minimal working version and more features are on the way (see the Roadmap section).

Installation

Prerequisite: have Go installed (version 1.18 or higher)

1. Clone this repository
2. Navigate to this repository's directory and run go build -o bin/
3. A new binary file called "pongo" will be created in the "bin" directory for you to add to your path
4. Now, run pongo [filename].pgo on any Pongo scripts you write to run the interpreter! (.pgo is Pongo's file extension)

Features

• labels and gotos, with labels also serving as a kind of constant.
• 16-bit signed integers (a "short")
• arrays of 16-bit signed integers (called a "buff" in pongo)
• the @ operator for checking single boolean flags as well as for buff indexing
• NO scoping, variables can be freed (or "smashed") at any point in the program's evaluation.

Read SPECIFICATION.md for more information. For syntax highlighting for Sublime Text, check the misc directory. For some example pongo scripts, check the examples directory.

Roadmap

• Operator Precedence Parsing (Go rewrite)
• List type (buff)
• sizeof unary operator
• Bit-index operator (@)
• Lists that can contain lists
• List resizing
• TinyBASIC-style repl
• Basic call-stack and returning for goto
• Proper if-statements (instead of "if x then goto (label)" just "if x then (statement)")