The intention with this is to create a programming language that deals natively with derivational morphemes.
As an example of what that means, consider the exec family of Linux syscalls: it's clear to a human what execvpe does from the definitions of exec, execp, execv, and exece, but the function needs a separate definition so that the compiler can tell. With derivational morphemes, you would be able to define what the suffix -p does and then the meaning of execvp could be automatically derived from the meaning of execv.
The language is stack-based, and until I implement more, is essentially a glorified RPN calculator.
All tokens are separated by whitespace (this includes after opening- and before closing-parentheses).
Basic arithmetic is done in stack-based (RPN) order:
2 3 +
pushes 2 and 3 to the stack, then uses the + operator to pop both and then push the result of adding them, giving 5.
7 1 -
yields 6.
2 4 1 + -
gives -3 (it computes as 2 - (4 + 1)).
Any alphanumeric string preceded by a ' is considered a name literal. You can bind values to names with the bind keyword. For example, to bind the name var to 2 run
2 'var bind
after that, in the same scope whenever Morpheus sees the token var it will have the value 3
A string of Morpheus code is treated as a single object if it is stored in a Quotation. To write a quotation, simply enclose the code in [ square brackets ], remembering to leave a space both before and after each bracket. You can execute the statements in a Quotation with the exec keyword.
[ 1 + ] 'inc bind
will bind the name inc to a quotation that increments a number. You can then use inc like a function:
4 inc exec
yields 5.
The omega combinator:
ω = (λ x . x x) (λ x . x x)
is a lambda calculus term that diverges: reducing it one step yields the original expression.
We can write the omega combinator in Morpheus as
[ [ 'x bind x x exec ] [ 'x bind x x exec ] exec ] 'omega bind
After this definition, running omega exec sends Morpheus into an infinite loop. (Eventually, the interpreter will run out of memory, since it maintains the scope of each function call: I haven't implemented proper tail calls.)