Are there any extensible interpreted programming languages written in standard, platform-independent C or C++?
I would like to be able to simply put all the sources in one directory, compile the sources with any standard compliant C or C++ compiler and produce an executable which reads and interprets script files in the designated scripting language.
It seems like many programming languages “written in C” often incorporate many features dependent on the platform they are in, and as a result, require some configuration program to run based on your target system (e.g. Autoconf) which complicates matters and limits cross-platform compatibility.
Reason for question:
I am interested in learning about programming language design. I have played with some toy programming languages after following tutorials involving yacc, lex, and llvm. However, recently I have become interested in studying a programming language written in portable C/C++, as that way, I can study the program and code on any machine that supports a standard C or C++ compiler (possibly even on my ipad) and still have a reasonably uniform experience.
As this is just for educational purposes, the scripting language doesn’t need to support super low level features like C, nor does it have to feature GUI like Java (I don’t think you can write any kind of GUI limited to standard C/C++ anyway) or any complicated io for that matter. However, I would like the language to be complete enough that it would be practical to write some useful programs in the language (e.g. It should be possible to extend the language using C/C++ so that you can use it like a shell on tty).
Thanks.
Edit:
@AndréCaron I would prefer it if at least the core of the language was 100% platform independent. It would be ok if the language included a large standard library that depended on other libraries to make it “more useful”, however, I would like to be able to strip the standard library and use just the core of the language (possibly with custom hand written libraries) if I wanted to.
Maybe embedded Lua?Actually core Lua itself is probably better. At first glance, I though eLua’s claim of running on many different systems meant it was highly portable, but in fact it takes core Lua and adds a bunch of hardware drivers, which obviously aren’t so portable.
Ocaml would be another excellent choice. It claims “The bytecoded system currently runs on any POSIX-compliant operating system with an ANSI-compliant C compiler” And Caml Light is especially suitable for learning. “The runtime system and bytecode interpreter is written in standard C, hence Caml Light is easy to port to almost any 32 or 64 bit platform.”