Extending the Reader for a Specialized Language
Extending the Reader to process Spreadsheet Formulas This is kind of a weird but fun experiment. Today I altered the Awesome Sauce Java reader so an application can extend it to process symbols. The concept started as is a way to process Awesome Sauce Java forms entered into a spreadsheet cell: (+ 1A 2A) Note: I'm inverting the normal cell reference labels to follow row/col format. I'll probably change it, but I like the different order. When I looked at the formula, I realized it needed to be processed either in a special reader, or in the actual reader. The fun part about building a functional language that's modeled after Lisp is the recognition that every problem is associated with a part/component, or a function. The structure of the language greatly simplifies the architecture. As soon as I realized the spreadsheet had to convert a cell reference, like 1A, and convert it to the value held in cell 1A? It became apparent the next problem was figuring...