introducing SPTL

There seems to be a long period of initial obscurity for any new language. Then after that comes a long period of semi-obscurity, followed by total obscurity.

Paul Bissex, quoted by Steve Yegge in The Next Big Language

So I've been working on the grammar for my language to target the Parrot Virtual Machine. As it turns out, creating a consistent context-free grammar is a lot harder than it may seem. Or maybe I've got a warped sense of what seems easy and what seems hard.

At any rate, the Simple Parrot Test Language (SPTL) is a small Perl-like language. In fact, at a glance it might appear to be a subset of Perl. However, some elements have different meanings in SPTL than in Perl. I'm going to spend the next few posts going over the details and explaining my design decisions. For now, the full BNF grammar can be found here (text file).