Towards the Design and Implementation of a Programming Language (Beex)

Abstract

Software Engineers, Computer Scientists, and Software Experts alike are faced to decide which programming language is best suited for a certain purpose as the use of programming languages grows. When we consider the various types of programming languages available today, such as Domain Specific Languages (DSL), General Purpose Languages (GPL), Functional Programming Languages (FPL), Imperative Programming Languages (IPL), amongst others, this becomes complicated. In this study, we introduce BeeX, an interpreted language, with the aim of showing the process and principles involved in language design and consider various choices faced by language designers of various programming languages. BeeX was created with simplicity in mind, thus the study focused on architectural design options. We look at the implementation standpoint and try to figure out what the basic building parts of most programming languages are, such as lexical analysis, syntax analysis, and evaluation phase. To achieve this, we created an interactive command interface that evaluated various BeeX language constructs(conditional logic statements, arithmetic expressions, loop constructs etc.) which allowed students to easily experiment with the proposed language. The results of the tests showed that students and programmers alike can use the BeeX programming language to create a variety of code structures that are simple to use.