Small stuff. For some reason not completely clear to me I decided that after implementing some Rosetta code examples it would be a nice idea to do some documentation tooling. Commonmark -a small and fast system for Markdown- seems the way to go. I am busy implementing an Egel wrapper around that, but I am somewhat baffled by the hoops I need to jump through to get it all done.
Lack of a foreign function interface (FFI) and lack of constants, or enumerations, are hurdles to take.
The first one, lack of an FFI, I don't want to tackle. My own small experiments with FFI in the Hi language lead me to the conviction that either you support the full C type system, probably including support for parsing header files, or your solution isn't worth it. And even when you got that covered you'll still need glue packages for interfacing with C++.
My solution: no FFI. "Write the glue in C++!" is the adagium for the moment.
The second one, lack of constants/enumerations, I think I want to tackle but I am not sure how yet. There are two well-known solutions: implement a preprocessor or support constants natively in the language. The first solution has as an advantage that that would also bring conditional compilation into the system, the second solution I didn't think fully through yet. Why did C++ implement the 'const' directive? For large constants? Supporting a directive would probably give an advantage that I can mark (large) terms which don't need to be reduced. But at the same time I want to introduce names for terms to insert and pattern match against.
I implemented the start of a String library and noted that I needed to refactor the module system. With the side notes that in the first case a C FFI wouldn't have helped since I was binding C++ Unicode string objects, and in the latter case modules now wrap transforms but need to reflect the conceptual model of Egel constructs properly.
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