Ginger Documentation Release 1.0 sfkl / gjh Nov 03, 2017 Contents 1 Contents 3 2 Help Topics 27 3 Common Syntax 53 4 Design Rationales 55 5 The Ginger Toolchain 83 6 Low-Level Implementation 99 7 Release Notes 101 8 Indices and tables 115 Bibliography 117 i ii Ginger Documentation, Release 1.0 This documentation is still very much work in progress The aim of the Ginger Project is to create a modern programming language and its ecosystem of libraries, documen- tation and supporting tools. The Ginger language draws heavily on the multi-language Poplog environment. Contents 1 Ginger Documentation, Release 1.0 2 Contents CHAPTER 1 Contents 1.1 Overview of Ginger Author Stephen Leach Email
[email protected] 1.1.1 Background Ginger is our next evolution of the Spice project. Ginger itself is a intended to be a rigorous but friendly programming language and supporting toolset. It includes a syntax-neutral programming language, a virtual machine implemented in C++ that is designed to support the family of Spice language efficiently, and a collection of supporting tools. Spice has many features that are challenging to support efficiently in existing virtual machines: pervasive multiple values, multiple-dispatch, multiple-inheritance, auto-loading and auto-conversion, dynamic virtual machines, implicit forcing and last but not least fully dynamic typing. The virtual machine is a re-engineering of a prototype interpreter that I wrote on holiday while I was experimenting with GCC’s support for FORTH-like threaded interpreters. But the toolset is designed so that writing alternative VM implementations is quite straightforward - and we hope to exploit that to enable embedding Ginger into lots of other systems.