I’ve always wanted to make a programming language. I’ve known how they work for a while, but this is my first (completed) programming language. It has bugs and the design could definitely be improved by a lot, but it’s a starting point.

Here’s a simple Fizzbuzz program in Telid:

let fn fizzbuzz n =
  if == % n 15 0
    'FizzBuzz'
  else if == % n 3 0
    'Fizz'
  else if == % n 5 0
    'Buzz'
  else
    n;

for i in .. 1 15 println(fizzbuzz(i));

let count = 15;
while < count 30 {
  count = + count 1;
  println(fizzbuzz(count));
}

How It Works

Telid has three stages (all written in Rust):

• The lexer first scans the tokens and outputs a Vec<Token>
• The parser (using Chumsky) outputs an AST (here, I decided to represent the top level as a Vec<Statement>)
• The evaluator then evaluates the AST given to it

Error reporting is done with Ariadne.

What I Could Improve

Of course, being my first language and a learning project, Telid has many issues. If I were to redo it, this is what I would do from the beginning:

• Use infix notation (prefix was simpler for me to implement)
• Use postfix for array indexing, not prefix (I couldn’t get postfix to work, and I didn’t spend too much time trying to get it to)
• Good error reporting – only the lexer and parser have good (decent, at the very least) error reporting; the evaluator simply outputs an error without the location, which makes for a horrible experience for anyone using the language – This has been fixed! See commit 740bd2b
• Figure the semicolon thing out