Below is a list of some of the most visible new language features in the Core language of X# , compared to Visual Objects and Vulcan.

As you can see many new keywords were introduced, but these are positional: they will also be recognized as Identifiers on other places, so there is very little chance that you will have to make changes to avoid naming conflicts.

Entities and Statements

Below is a list of the new commands / entities inside X#. There are also some new options for existing commands. A full list of changes will be available later.

Some people have asked us how we are going to write our compiler, and if that is not very complicated.

The honest answer to that question is that it is indeed very complicated, but we use tools to help us doing it, which makes it a little bit easier.

In my previous blog article I have described how we are using the Roslyn infrastructure for a large part of our compiler, and that “all” we have to do is to create a recognizer for our language.

In this article I would like to elaborate a little bit about the language recognition part.

Antlr

For our language recognition we are using a tool called ANTLR (Another Tool for Language Recognition), written by Terence Parr, a professor from the University of San Fransisco.

This tool allows us to generate a major part of the language recognizer from language definition files. This language definition roughly consist of 2 elements:

1. Tokens. These are the sequences of characters that form the Keywords, Identifiers, Constants (Strings, Integers, Floats, Symbols etc.) comments and whitespace in our language.
2. Rules. These are the sequences of tokens that form our language.

From this definition the Antlr tool generates classes:

1. A Lexer class that scans the source code and builds a list of tokens (the tokenstream)
2. A Parser class that uses the rules and scans for the patterns from the language elements. This builds the Parse Tree.