What is Lead?

Lead is a C style pseudo language for visualising compilatition of simple high level langauge constructs into assembly. leadc can currently compile to a low level intermediate format called AIR. You can view this output from the compiler using the build command, or run it in the included virtual machine with run. For more information about building and viewing the compiler workflow, see the section Lexing and Parsing. A GUI for visualising compilation is in progress.

Getting Started

1. You'll need Rust and its tools to use this project, you can install them via rustup.
2. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/RabidGhost/lead.git

3. Run the example project with

   cargo run -- run example.ed

4. Get started writing code

Writing Code

Variables

Variables must be declared the before they are used. You can declare a variable with

let foo := 42;

Once variables are declared, they are mutable.

foo := foo * 12;

Printing

To print a variable, you use the yield keyword to yield the value from the virtual machine.

yield (34 + foo);

> 538

Conditional Execution

You can conditionally execute code with if, for example.

let bar := 12;
let foo := 4;
yield foo;
if ((foo + bar) - 6) <= 10 {
	yield 7;
}

> 4
> 7

Arrays

You can initialise arrays with a familiar syntax.

let arr := [1, 8, 12 * 2];

Arrays are statically sized at compile time. To index an array, use square brackets. Array indexing starts at zero.

yield arr[0];

> 1

Directly yielding an array will display the memory address of the array.

Lexing and Parsing

leadc can also provide outputs of its internal structures during the compilation process. This is provided in the way of the lex and parse commands, that display the processed tokens and syntax tree respectiveley.