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One option you could also try is to use an existing language's syntax. Plenty of languages have high quality parser libraries by now, like swc/rome/acorn for Ja

One option you could also try is to use an existing language's syntax. Plenty of languages have high quality parser libraries by now, like swc/rome/acorn for JavaScript, rustc_parse for Rust, et. Of course syntax is influenced by semantics, so you'll end up wanting to remove or add syntax, but you could probably get decently far before that ends up a problem.

User23 3y ago
> Of course syntax is influenced by semantics Only to the extent that AST structure depends on syntax. For something like s-expressions defining new semantics never requires new syntax since arbitrary trees suffice to syntactically express any AST.
- dfox 3y ago
  One of my exploratory projects while I still though that academics career made sense involved replacing smalltalk's stack based bytecode with incrementally transformed S-expression trees. Naturally the first thing I went out to do was writing S-expression reader and writer in smalltalk, my advisor at the time told me that it is pointless busywork and I should just use ST literal syntax, it looked somewhat ugly with all the # there, but saved a lot of time. Well, 12 years later (ie. early 2023) I realized that I don't really have any kind of cool sideproject and started implementing the same idea in C (with the added goal of the VM being natively multithreaded with fine-grained locking along the lines of JikesRVM and WebKit). Well, I have stub implementations of classes needed for the AST representation and S-expression reader and writer…
  - User23 3y ago
    Yeah I was working on something similar with Go. We weren’t exactly trying to turn it into a Lisp, but for various reasons outputting the Go AST as s-exps was interesting. That got me thinking that if I ever do any language design again I’m almost certainly going to just start by writing a Lisp and then layering any additional syntax that appears desirable on top of that.
- hardwaregeek 3y ago
  Sure, but if you're using an existing language grammar, it will almost certainly be influenced by the language's semantics, unless that language happens to be lisp (and even then most lisps are not pure s-expressions)

User23 3y ago

> Of course syntax is influenced by semantics Only to the extent that AST structure depends on syntax. For something like s-expressions defining new semantics never requires new syntax since arbitrary trees suffice to syntactically express any AST.

dfox 3y ago
One of my exploratory projects while I still though that academics career made sense involved replacing smalltalk's stack based bytecode with incrementally transformed S-expression trees. Naturally the first thing I went out to do was writing S-expression reader and writer in smalltalk, my advisor at the time told me that it is pointless busywork and I should just use ST literal syntax, it looked somewhat ugly with all the # there, but saved a lot of time. Well, 12 years later (ie. early 2023) I realized that I don't really have any kind of cool sideproject and started implementing the same idea in C (with the added goal of the VM being natively multithreaded with fine-grained locking along the lines of JikesRVM and WebKit). Well, I have stub implementations of classes needed for the AST representation and S-expression reader and writer…
- User23 3y ago
  Yeah I was working on something similar with Go. We weren’t exactly trying to turn it into a Lisp, but for various reasons outputting the Go AST as s-exps was interesting. That got me thinking that if I ever do any language design again I’m almost certainly going to just start by writing a Lisp and then layering any additional syntax that appears desirable on top of that.
hardwaregeek 3y ago
Sure, but if you're using an existing language grammar, it will almost certainly be influenced by the language's semantics, unless that language happens to be lisp (and even then most lisps are not pure s-expressions)