gobasic

I had a lot of fun with this book, after belatedly buying it. I've read a couple of similar online-books in the past, but this was the first one I worked my way through completely. As a result I later had a lot of fun writing a simple compiler for a reverse-polish calculator, to generate AMD64 assembly language https://github.com/skx/math-compiler/ , wrote a simple BASIC intepreter https://github.com/skx/gobasic , and put together a couple of DSL-projects which followed a similar approach. All in all I'd recommend reading it, and definitely working through the code. Once you're done you can continue to experiment - adding support for regular expressions, a standard-library, etc, etc. My version of the language is here and contains a fair number of improvements/additions. After covering the core in such detail it wasn't hard to extend

I did embed it in a web-server, so that the user can enter BASIC into a <textarea> and have the output rendered by their browser as an image. I called it "visual basic" ;) https://github.com/skx/gobasic/#80-print-visual-basic Just a small example really of embedding, I suspect to make it really useful for new-programmers it'd need a lot of overhaul. When my child gets old enough I'll probably just give them a BBC-emulator, or similar to get started with.

I've been interested in programming languages for a long time, and I know that frequently people post links to their own implementations here. Have you created your own programming language? Be it a compiler, and interpreter, or a virtual-machine? If you've not created one of your own are there any niche, small, modern, or new languages you enjoy experimenting with, even if not used in production? (Not directly related, but if you do have an interest in writing a language I'd highly recommend the "Writing an interpreter in Go" book, by Thorsten Ball. I had fun working through the code, and my own version of the monkey interpreter became pretty advanced https://github.com/skx/monkey/ it also lead to me writing a simple BASIC interpreter https://github.com/skx/gobasic/ - then later still an assembly-language compiler for a calculator.)

I started coding on a Spectrum, initially in BASIC then in z80 machine code: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html Recently I hacked together a simple BASIC interpreter in golang, which was fun. Whenever I had a choice about implementation I picked the choice that was closest to the Sinclair-BASIC I remembered: http://github.com/skx/gobasic/

I wrote a simple BASIC interpreter in golang, and added a simple HTTP-server to allow you to write a program that would draw graphs/images: * https://blog.steve.fi/a_visual_basic_server.html * https://github.com/skx/gobasic/ Pretty fun learning experience, but even with the browser-based input I'm not sure it's hands-on enough. Might be worth buying an old home computer and hooking it up to the TV!