Implement 5 engines for classic languages

[max99x]

These are languages in which no one would write serious code today. People will come to the site, play around with them for 5 minutes and maybe paste some of their old programs to check if they work. Then they will go on their way and never return. These are nice to have, but they won't be of real, practical use to anyone and won't attract consistent traffic in the long term. A consideration about these is that even though they are not very important, people might dismiss the application if they fail to run their favourite pet project.

So far we have 1/5, QBasic, implemented incompletely, based on qb.js. That leaves 4/5.

Applesoft BASIC seems like a fairly decent contender for one of those slots. It's featureful and the JS interpreter for it is under active development.

Forth is another good choice. It's simple and there's a JS interpreter. Still need to check whether it has any standard libraries supported.

Smalltalk might be viable, but I'm so clueless about it that it'll need a fair bit of research. The default environment is very rich, including UI and various browsers, so it may or may not be usable in a REPL. A quick search returns some successful attempts to use it in a REPL, but it's not enough for a final judgement. There are several JS interpreters:

• http://silversmalltalk.wordpress.com/
• http://clamato.net/
• https://github.com/NicolasPetton/jtalk

Finally we have the various assemblers, like the 6502. They have the advantage of being simple to implement, but writing assembly in a REPL is masochistic. I propose adding one of these only as a last resort. They might be a better option for later, when we include a rich text editor.

[max99x]

630e55c1d6ab00e12e83 brings this to 2/5 with the addition of Forth.

[amasad]

a48a2ef6166ecd5a1293 brings this to 3/5 with the addition of Smalltalk. Notes and Todos:

• jtalk's kernel classes differs from Pharo's. Hence bringing in kernel code from Pharo, is not as a straight forward.
• As there doesn't exist a proper Smalltalk REPL, we need to define our own print "messages" to the basic Object class and all subclasses.
• Need to define stdin behavior.
• Need to write meaningful examples.
• Every smalltalk implementation I looked at revolved around GUI, and had a rich IDE. CLI scripting is limited. This may not be as useful as other languages, however this could be used for playing around with language symantics and maybe for learning "Smalltlak 101".

[max99x]

Back to 2/5 with the ditching of Smalltalk.

[max99x]

Removed from launch milestone. Looks like we'll be launching with 2/5.