Please critique my metalanguage: “Dogma”

Question

Hi HN!Dogma (formerly KBNF) is a modernized metalanguage with better expressiveness and binary support, focusing on documentation. It follows the familiar patterns of Backus-Naur Form, and includes a number of innovations that make it also suitable for describing binary data.Link here: https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/dogma_v1.mdI've been working hard after the feedback I got in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34720488 and would really appreciate another round of critiques :)A lot of the changes were to harmonize the grammar so that the language "feels" more consistent with fewer surprising behaviors and edge cases.If you use metalanguage grammars, please take a gander and let me know where Dogma might cause problems in your use cases!Thanks :)

kstenerud · Accepted Answer

Specific changes to address previous feedback:
* Added an "above-the-fold" introductory example.
* Added the "eod" function to match the end of the input.
* Removed the "when" function and replaced it with switch syntax.
* Renamed the "bind" function to the "var" function.
* Removed "any_type" from the grammar.
* Introduced "bits" as a formal type. "expression" now refers to expressions of any type.
* The "bits" type can also be compared to produce a condition.
* Added the "!="" comparator.
* Split numbers into singular types and set types.
* Number sets can now be constructed using alternatives and exclusion.
* Removed "real" since it's just a number with no invariant. Use "number" and "numbers" instead.
* "signed" and "unsigned" have been renamed to "sinteger" and "uinteger" to emphasize the integer invariant.
* ieee754 special floating point values NaN, inf, and negative 0 are now generated via special functions, and have no "number" representation.
* Modulo division now uses truncation, following with most popular languages.
* Undefined arithmetic operations are no longer allowed.
* The variadic parameter specifier can only be applied to the last argument of a function (bugfix).
* Clarified what the parameter value 0 does in some functions.
* Removed alternatives operation for type names.
* Added note about Unicode equivalence and normalization.
* Removed character encoding length restriction.
* Switched out some contrived examples for real-world examples (UDP, Ethernet, RTP, TR-DOS file descriptor).

KRAKRISMOTT · Answer

Improve the tooling more. Formatters, syntax highlighters, language servers, host language integration. Too many languages remain toys because their creators do not address the infrastructure issue and only work on the compiler.

junon · Answer

Looks cool. Great first example, it's highly applicable and actually doesn't look bad.
Perhaps adding a few more "marketing" things to the readme - or at least, perhaps a few questions you might answer here.
- Is this a toy? Or is your intent to polish this for real world use? Just curious.
- How does error handling work?
- Does this compile down to a language for integration into an application? It's unclear (at least, from reading the docs for a few minutes) what the output artifacts for this are.

grok22 · Answer

Apart from clearly specifying the binary format, do you have any tools to generate code to process said format? What do you envision this will be used for -- apart from documentation?

cabalamat · Answer

In expressions such as: uint(48, ~); What does ~ mean? If it means anything is allowed, then it would be more concise to simply say: uint(48);

svilen_dobrev · Answer

how this compares to, say, https://preserves.dev/ ?i thought of similar thing/lang very long time ago, then for reverse engineering purposes. e.g. describe old (pre-)M$ word doc binary format, have an interpreter over it, then use it to add some changes to a document..

Please critique my metalanguage: “Dogma”

Improve the tooling more. Formatters, syntax highlighters, language servers, host language integration. Too many languages remain toys because their creators do not address the infrastructure issue and only work on the compiler.

Apart from clearly specifying the binary format, do you have any tools to generate code to process said format? What do you envision this will be used for -- apart from documentation?

In expressions such as:
`uint(48, ~);`
What does ~ mean? If it means anything is allowed, then it would be more concise to simply say:
`uint(48);`

how this compares to, say, https://preserves.dev/ ?
i thought of similar thing/lang very long time ago, then for reverse engineering purposes. e.g. describe old (pre-)M$ word doc binary format, have an interpreter over it, then use it to add some changes to a document..