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. More information is available at Nomsu's homepage.

Dependencies

Nomsu's only dependencies are Lua 5.2+ (or Luajit 2.0+, compiled with XCFLAGS=-DLUAJIT_ENABLE_LUA52COMPAT for Lua 5.2 compatibility) and LPEG (luarocks install lpeg). 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. Optionally, if luafilesystem (Lua version or LuaJIT version) is installed, it will be used. Otherwise Nomsu will fall back to using system commands (find and ls), which is slower and a bit less safe. Nomsu has been tested on Mac and Linux, but not Windows.

Usage

• To run Nomsu interactively (a REPL), simply run lua nomsu.lua (or luajit nomsu.lua).
• To run a .nom file with Nomsu code, run lua nomsu.lua your_file.nom.
• The full usage options are avilable via lua nomsu.lua --help.

Examples

There's a more complete set of example code in examples/how_do_i.nom, but roughly, Nomsu looks like:

say "Hello"

$my_nums = [5, 23, 42]
for $num in $my_nums:
    say "\$num is one of my nums"

(sing $n bottles of beer) means:
    for $i in $n to 1 by -1:
        say "
            \$i bottle\("s" if ($i > 1) else "") of beer on the wall,
            \$i bottle\("s" if ($i > 1) else "") of beer!
            Take one down, pass it around..."
    say "No bottles of beer on the wall."

sing 99 bottles of beer

Compiling/installing

If you enjoy Nomsu so much that you'd like to tinker with it or have it in your system path, there is an included Makefile. This is entirely optional, but you can run make to compile any modified .moon or .nom files into .lua files and produce an executable file called nomsu that can be run directly. make test will run the suite of tests. sudo make install will install the compiler on your system. By default, the nomsu executable will be put in /usr/local/bin and all the necessary support files will be put into /usr/local/share/nomsu/* and /usr/local/lib/nomsu/*, but you can change the location during installation or via the PREFIX=/your/path/here flag. The default build options use the system default lua, but this can be changed via make LUA=luajit or make LUA_BIN=/path/to/lua. To uninstall, simply make uninstall and provide the same installation path you did during installation.

File Layout

All .moon files have been precompiled into corresponding .lua files, so you don't need to have Moonscript installed to run the Nomsu compiler.

• nomsu - A shell script that selects between different installed versions of Nomsu (using the -V flag). You can use this script to, for example, run nomsu -V 1.2 your_script.nom to run with the latest version of Nomsu that matches 1.2.?.?. All flags and arguments are passed along to whichever Nomsu compiler is chosen.
• nomsu.moon - The source code for the Nomsu command line runner. This handles loading the nomsu environment and compiler and running the REPL.
• nomsu.*.peg - The Parsing Expression Grammar used to define each version of Nomsu's syntax. The format of this file is a slightly modified version of the format accepted by LPEG's re module.
• parser.moon - The Nomsu parser. This file can also be imported and used directly for applications that only need to parse Nomsu, not compile it.
• nomsu_compiler.moon - The actual Nomsu compiler. This file defines a function that transforms a Nomsu syntax tree into runnable Lua code.
• nomsu_decompiler.moon - This file defines functions that transform Nomsu syntax trees back into Nomsu code. This can be used for auto-formatting.
• nomsu_environment.moon - This file defines the environment in which Nomsu code runs, including some basic built-in functions.
• bitops.moon - This is a shim for Lua 5.2 and LuaJIT that defines bitwise operations that respect metamethods.
• code_obj.moon - Datastructures used for incrementally building generated code, while preserving code source information.
• containers.moon - A library that defines some custom containers (List and Dict) used by nomsu.
• error_handling.moon - The logic for producing good error messages within Lua that reference the Nomsu source code that led to them.
• files.moon - A library for interacting with the filesystem.
• pretty_errors.moon - A simple library for displaying errors in a more visually pleasing/readable way.
• string2.moon - A library defining some extra functionality for strings.
• syntax_tree.moon - Datastructures used for Nomsu Abstract Syntax Trees.
• examples/how_do_i.nom - A simple walkthrough of some of the features of Nomsu, written in Nomsu code. This is a good place to start.
• core/*.nom - Core language definitions of stuff like control flow, operators, and metaprogramming, broken down into different files.
• lib/*.nom - Optional language libraries for stuff you might want, like interfacing with the OS, or doing Object Oriented Programming.
• compatibility/*.nom - Code for automatically upgrading Nomsu code from old versions to the current version.
• tools/*.nom - A set of utilities useful for doing code manipulation actions.
• Makefile - Rules for building/installing the compiler.
• LICENSE - The software license (MIT).
• README.md - This file.

Versioning

Nomsu uses the following versioning scheme: [syntax version].[core library API version].[compiler internal API version].[lib/ API version]. Which means:

• Any code that parses on Nomsu X.a.b.c.d will also parse on Nomsu X.p.w.r.s
• Any code that compiles on Nomsu X.Y.a.b.c will also compile on Nomsu X.Y.p.q.r and run without any differences, as long as it only depends on the behavior of the core library functions (i.e. stuff defined in core/*.nom), and doesn't mess with the compiler internals at all.
• Any code that compiles on Nomsu X.Y.Z.a.b will also compile on Nomsu X.Y.Z.p.q and run without any differences, even if it messes with the compiler internals, as long as it doesn't use anything from lib/*.nom.
• Any code that compiles on Nomsu X.Y.Z.W will also compile on any other Nomsu X.Y.Z.W and run without any differences, even if it uses stuff from lib/*.nom.

When Nomsu is istalled via make install, all of Nomsu's lua files and core/*.nom and lib/*.nom files are stored in $PREFIX/lib/nomsu/$NOMSU_VERSION and the Nomsu executable is installed to $PREFIX/bin/nomsu$NOMSU_VERSION, along with the file nomsu (the version-selection script), which goes to $PREFIX/bin/nomsu. When make uninstall is run, all those files are deleted (except for nomsu, if there are other versions installed).

To run different versions, use the -V flag, which will select the latest version matching the specified pattern. For example, if you have v1.0.0.0, v1.0.2.1, and 1.1.0.0 installed, then nomsu will run v1.1.0.0, nomsu -V 1.0 will run v1.0.2.1, and nomsu -V 1.0.0.0 will run v1.0.0.0.

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.