Now that we have the beginnings of a parser, let's take the script to
run as a command-line argument and move all the test scripts into
/home/anon/js :^)
To run a script, simply use "js":
$ js my-script.js
To get an AST dump before execution, you can use "js -A"
This adds a basic Javascript lexer and parser. It can parse the
currently existing demo programs. More work needs to be done to
turn it into a complete parser than can parse arbitrary JS Code.
The lexer outputs tokens with preceeding whitespace and comments
in the trivia member. This should allow us to generate the exact
source code by concatenating the generated tokens.
The parser is written in a way that it always returns a complete
syntax tree. Error conditions are represented as nodes in the
tree. This simplifies the code and allows it to be used as an
early stage parser, e.g for parsing JS documents in an IDE while
editing the source code.:
Previously, we were assuming all declared variables were bound to a
block scope, now, with the addition of declaration types, we can bind
a variable to a block scope using `let`, or a function scope (the scope
of the inner-most enclosing function of a `var` declaration) using
`var`.
The above snippet is a MemberExpression that necessitates the implicit
construction of a StringObject wrapper around a PrimitiveString.
We then do a property lookup (a "get") on the StringObject, where we
find the "length" property. This is pretty neat! :^)
It's now possible to assign expressions to variables. The variables are
put into the current scope of the interpreter.
Variable lookup follows the scope chain, ending in the global object.
I always tell people to start building things by working on the thing
that seems the most interesting right now. The most interesting thing
here was an AST + simple interpreter, so that's where we start!
There is no lexer or parser yet, we build an AST directly and then
execute it in the interpreter, producing a return value.
This seems like the start of something interesting. :^)
