StackTalk

This is a prototype for a language I'm calling StackTalk

The core's core ideas are as follows:

• Quotations, aka code as lists of symbols, that are runtime editable
• Objects, the main contents of which are multiple named stacks
• A global* value stack
• A global* "me" stack, for the current object

The limbs around that core look liek this:

• A handful of syntax sugars that make it easy to write most common shapes of program, nota
• • word[ code ] becomes [ code ] word, which gives more options w/r/t ordering things
• • word[ some code :or some other code ] produces an object that has some code as quotation in the proc stack and some other code in the or stack. This allows writing programs with named and/or optional parts much more easily than in many quotation-based stack languages.

The end result ends up looking like a cross between Io, Smalltalk and Factor:

Account: is-obj[
    0.0 >balance
    deposit: fn[ balance: += ] 
    show: fn[ "Account balance: $" balance + /nl + Io .write ]
]

"Initial: " Io .write
Account .show

"Depositing $10" Io .println
Account .[ 10.0 deposit ]

"Final: " Io .write
Account .show

* Global being "global to a given interpreter state".

Trying it out

If you just want to try out a little bit of StackTalk, there's a playground at https://stk.junglecoder.com/playground.html.

Getting started locally

To run stacktalk locally, I recommend using node 22 or a compatible JS runtime. Then you should be able to run ./nstk.sh install.stk to install StackTalk to /home/$USER/.stacktalk, which you can then add to your $PATH to get access to stk on posix systems.

REPL

You can run stk -e repl to get a basic stacktalk REPL going.

Projects

If you want to make utility scripts for a given project/folder, you can write a project.stk file. When running stk, any function defined with cmd can be directly invoked by stk like so:

project.stk:

project[
    test: cmd[ "Test" print ]
]

At a command line:

stk test # Prints "Test"

TODOS

• Add support for ^name as sugar for ^[ name ]
• Change how modules work so that they can be referenced w/o copying their entire contents
• Autobox strings, booleans and numbers if they are placed on the me stack
• Syntax highlighting code editor for playground.