Since the last blog post, which was a while ago and missed a lot of important developments, the first half of the project has been submitted. I’ll try to keep it updated more often from now on. I’ve settled on Poki Nanpa as its name (Toki Pona for “Number Box”) and now begins the work of actual implementation. The first part of that, as specified in the project plan and with the self-imposed deadline of the end of February, is designing and writing a specification for the language, both as a guide for others on how to use it, and as a guide for myself on how to implement it.

To get an idea of how a programming language specification is structured I took a look at the specification for the C programming language. I own a copy that was apparently illicitly smuggled out of India at some point, according to the confidently authoritative warning label on the cover.

This specification breaks the C language up into digestible chunks, starting with an overview and tutorial of the basics, and then moving into a more detailed look at each aspect of the language; operators, control flow, functions, pointers, structures, and input/output. It concludes with an overview of the C standard library. This is a good basic structure from which to form the specification for Poki Nanpa, although hopefully mine will be a lot shorter than 272 pages.

In writing this specification, I will be able to iron out the specifics of how the language works. Amendments should be iteratively added during development as required, so I plan to host it in the same Git repository as the implementation code itself will eventually go in, located here: https://git.arts.ac.uk/24021566/poki-nanpa

The inspirations behind Poki Nanpa are laid out in more detail in the actual project submission, as far as the word limit would allow. The basic plan is to create a functional language reliant on graphical inputs and outputs using the vocabulary of Toki Pona.