Nomsu

Nomsu (named after Nomic, and its creator, Peter Suber) is a programming language designed to be used for playing games of Nomic, or engaging in other similar activities revolving around natural language rule-making and self modification.

Dependencies

Nomsu's only dependencies are Lua 5.2 or later (tested with version 5.2.4) (or Luajit (tested with version 2.1.0)), LPEG (luarocks install lpeg), and LuaFileSystem (luarocks install luafilesystem). Nomsu's compiler was written in Moonscript, but all of the .moon files have been compiled into lua for convenience, so Moonscript is not a dependency.

Usage

• To get a nomsu REPL, simply run lua nomsu.lua.
• To run a .nom file with nomsu code, run lua nomsu.lua your_file.nom. Or lua nomsu.lua - if reading from stdin.
• (Advanced/optional) To precompile a .nom file into lua, run lua nomsu.lua -c <your_file>.nom to precompile your file into lua (by default, saved at <your_file>.lua). If you run the compiler with the "-O" (for Optimized) flag, the compiler will run the precompiled lua files directly, instead of parsing and compiling the .nom files before running them. This is not necessary, but it can speed things up if you precompile a bunch of code that involves macros or compile-time activity.
• More usage options are avilable via lua nomsu.lua --help.

Layout

• nomsu.moon/nomsu.lua - The nomsu compiler. The compiler is written in Moonscript, but a lua version of the file is provided in this repository for convenience.
• utils.lua - A set of utility functions used by nomsu.moon.
• consolecolors.lua - Lua module that defines ANSI color codes for colored console output (used internally in nomsu.moon).
• examples/how_do_i.nom - A simple walkthrough of some of the features of nomsu, written in nomsu. This is a good place to start.
• lib/object.nom - An optional library for doing object-oriented programming.
• lib/collections.nom - Core library definitions related to collections, like lists and dictionaries.
• lib/control_flow.nom - Core library definitions related to control flow, like if statements and for loops.
• lib/core.nom - Core library file that loads other core library files. Files are loaded in dependency order.
• lib/math.nom - Core library definitions of math functions, like sum of % and sqrt %.
• lib/metaprogramming.nom - Core library essential functionality for metaprogramming, including macros to define macros, rules to define rules, and so on. This is where the language pulls itself up by its hair out the swamps of nothingness.
• lib/operators.nom - Core library definitions for operators like = and +.
• lib/text.nom - Core library definitions of text functions for stuff like concatenating strings.
• lib/training_wheels.nom - An optional library to define some syntactic sugar that makes Nomsu resemble other programming languages more closely.
• tests/*.nom - A somewhat exhaustive set of minimalist tests for almost every language feature defined in lib/*.nom
• compile_lib.sh - script to precompile lib/*.nom so they can be loaded faster. This is optional.

Extra

There is a vim plugin for the language available in the Vim Nomsu repository. It is usually kept relatively up-to-date with Nomsu, but occasionally lags behind.