The Little Language That Could

From the website:

qdbp is small. Really, really small. The language has just one keyword and a small handful of core constructs(along with full type inference and a little bit of syntax sugar to sweeten the deal). In fact here is a small program that demonstrates every single primitive of the language:

object := {
  Method1[arg1 arg2 | arg1 + arg2.]
  Method2[arg1 arg2 | $foreign_fn_bool(0 0.01 "hello world")]
}
extended_object := { object ::
  Method3[arg1 arg2 | (arg1 * arg2)]
}
six := extended_object Method3 arg1: 3 arg2: (@math Factorial 2).
tagged_object := #Ok string
tagged_object
  Ok? [that| that Print.]
  Error? [ {} ]
  Other? [ @abort!. ].

As a comparison, Go 1.20 has 25 keywords, Python 3.10 has 38, C++14 has 84, and Lua 5.4 has 22. Neither keyword nor feature count are sufficient to judge language simplicity, but they are good approximations, and the magnitude of the difference between qdbp and its closest competitor is striking. Though the snippet above may seem unfamiliar, understanding those 15 lines, along with learning a little bit of syntax sugar, is all that is required to understand the entire language.

Of course, just being small and simple is not sufficient. If it were, the world would run on Brainfuck. qdbp's beauty comes from its ability to compose its small set of primitives to express complex abstractions. Here is a list and demonstration of common language features that qdbp can emulate. The list includes

• Infinite lists
• If/then/else
• All sorts of loops
• Inheritance
• Iterators
• Switch
• Operators
• Functional programming Patterns(list, map, filter, etc)
• Modules
• Domain specific language creation, despite not having macros

That qdbp's core feature set can be so naturally wielded to express complex abstractions is testament to the elegance of the language. The goal of qdbp is to be the distillation of programming into only its necessary components, and in doing so, become greater than the sum of its parts. If this sounds like something you want from a language, clone this repo, checkout qdbp's website, and follow the quickstart below. Happy qdbping!

Quick Start

qdbp requires ocaml, dune, menhir, and libgmp. To use the compiler, write your program in your text editor or IDE of your choice, clone this repo and, run

dune exec ../bin/main.exe -- <filename> --runtime-dir ./runtime

Note that runtime-dir is a mandatory argument and must be set to the runtime directory in this repo.

A copy of samples/string.qdbp must be in the same directory as the program in question