Getting in on the ground floor tends to be my advice for a lot things. It's hard to make something click if you can't see it work in the flesh. For the typical

Getting in on the ground floor tends to be my advice for a lot things. It's hard to make something click if you can't see it work in the flesh. For the typical functions that print output or take input or the likes, I'm always partial to keeping them separate from the grammar itself. You can see the distinction clearly between for example Python: print myVar and Java: System.out.println(myVar); In Python, the print verb is defined in the grammar, and as such needs to be parsed and handled properly. In Java's case, it's regarded as any other method. It's irrelevant to the parser what it does, it just needs to handle it like it would a normal method. This tends to make the whole easier to debug and adapt, since you never need to touch the parser to change behavior of one of these standard methods. This does ofcourse lead to more complex applications, which may not be desirable, depending on the intent of the language. Just my 2 cents :)