README

Copyright (C) 2010 Brandon Lewis

Introduction

Goof is an experimental functional language with a novel implementation. It is a library of functions and macros which combine to create the illusion that you are writing in a high-level language. Despite this, goof programs are C programs. They are compiled and executed like any other.

Don't be fooled into thinking it's efficient: Goof is essentially a dynamic language, with the runtime implemented directly in C.

Goof programs are expressed as nested calls to functions and macros. Each function returns a pointer to an object which implements a language contruct.

Known Downsides (or, "Why in God's name are you doing this?")

• I just wrote it over the weekend for fun

• No memory management at present

• Dynamic implementation is probably inefficient

• I am largely ignorant of how concurrency might affect this system

• Possibly difficult to debug, and syntax erros are difficult to resolve due to the heavy abuse of preprocessor macros.

  Potential Upsides

Though I acknowledge that this is really a pretty terrible thing to do to an unsuspecting C programmer, I feel that there might be certain useful features of this approach that are worth exploring. In addition to the well-known advantages of functional programming, goof might offer the following:

• educational value

• small implementation

• easy to add new constructs to the language

• easy to inter-operate between C and goof

• requires nothing other than a C compiler (after removing the glib code)

• you potentially mix and match different semantics within the same executable (e.g. applicative versus normal order, eager versus strict, allow non-deterministic evaluation etc).

  Liscence

Goof is available under LGPL v3