This is the third and final part of a series on building a simple calculator REPL in Rust. (You may with to read part one and part two first.)
Here we’re going to talk about the
eval function, which takes an array of tokens, and either returns the result of the calculation or an error. You may have noticed that I used Polish notation, e.g.,
+ 3 4 in this language, with the expressions delimited by parentheses. The reason for this is two-fold: First, I want to make this into a more full-featured Lisp interpreter one day, and second, for the same reason that Lisp is written in prefix notation – it makes things easy to parse. As wikipedia says:
When Polish notation is used as a syntax for mathematical expressions by programming language interpreters, it is readily parsed into abstract syntax trees and can, in fact, define a one-to-one representation for the same. Because of this, Lisp (see below) and related programming languages define their entire syntax in terms of prefix notation (and others use postfix notation).
We can think of an expression like
(* (+ 2 3) (+ 1 3)) as a tree, with the division operator at the root and
(+ 2 3) and
(+ 1 3) as sub-trees. One major difference in the language I’ve defined from Polish mathematical notation is that I allow an arbitrary number of operands to follow each operator, which is why I need parentheses. Continue reading “Calculator REPL Part 3: Evaluating the tokens”
This is the second post in a series about building a calculator REPL in Rust. You may want to start with the first post. Today I’ll talk about how the tokenizer is built.
The tokenizer, basically, is a function that looks at a string and recognizes chunks that are meaningful to the program. In the calculator REPL I wrote, these are represented as an enumerated type, because they can be a delimiter, an operator, or a value. Continue reading “Calculator REPL Part 2: Tokenizing the Input”
A friend and I are working on adding Rust support to Metaparticle.
We did a simple search for “decorators in Rust” and found this repo, which seemed promising. My friend added it, but soon found it wouldn’t build without using the nightly channel of rustc. I didn’t notice right away, because I like to experiment with Rust and have been running nightly by default for months, but my friend found this very off-putting. From his perspective, it seems like he can’t adopt Rust yet, because too many libraries require nightly, which makes it seem like the language isn’t production-ready yet. Continue reading “How can I help Stabilize Things?”
This will be a short series on building a calculator REPL in Rust. This is a program that can evaluate expressions like
(+ 3 (2 * 4)) (and get
11 in this case).
The source is all on GitHub. Also, to help people follow along, I’ve made branches that represent different steps of the process. All the branches are named like
step-n-do-foo. My first code is on
step-1-node-structs is where I added the tokens (which I called nodes for a minute).
The code has two main components: the tokenizer and the interpreter. Continue reading “A Calculator REPL in Rust”