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Writing a language in Go, which doesn't have sum types won't be fun. Also, if you want to implement a compiler, and not an interpreter, the host language havin

• zik 12y ago
  I'm writing a language in Go. It is fun. Sum types (and ASTs) are implemented with interfaces which provide a pretty clean and type safe way of doing this.
  • Peaker 12y ago
    Can you show some small example encoding of an AST in Go?
    • rogpeppe1 12y ago
      http://golang.org/pkg/go/ast/ http://golang.org/pkg/go/ast/ Well, not that small, i guess :-)
    • stcredzero 12y ago
      The code for Twik has a simple AST in it. Of course, it's Lisp, so it's perhaps too simple. http://blog.labix.org/2013/07/16/twik-a-tiny-language-for-go http://blog.labix.org/2013/07/16/twik-a-tiny-language-for-go
      • Peaker 12y ago
        The duplication there in each AST node kinda hurts the eyes :) Also, the type-switch on interface {} is ugly. Consider how an AST looks like in Haskell: data AST = LiteralInt Int | LiteralFloat Float | List [AST] ... And then an eval looks like: case ast of LiteralInt int -> ... LiteralFloat float -> ... List nodes -> ... and it is safe, rather than interface{}, you get the AST type and you get exhaustiveness checking that you covered all cases. Also, if you add an annotation to each AST element (e.g: inferred types), you can very easily and safely map over them, etc.