News
A summary of the main events around and about Ursa.
2023
18 March 2024
Version 0.2.15 marks a milestone: it has a complete JavaScript back-end. So far this is not very useful; in particular, you can’t use it to compile an Ursa program to standalone JavaScript. But it does represent a considerable amount of work compiling Ursa to a different target, it comes with full sourcemap support, and will make it easier to use Ursa on the web and in IDEs.
27 December 2023
Andrei Olea wrote to the Matrix space to say that he had done 2023 Advent of Code Day 25 partly in Ursa. His solution also uses Graphviz!
19 December 2023
Ursa now has a blog! I will write about the process of making Ursa there. The inital post gives some pre-history.
18 December 2023
The tutorial now has a complete introduction and first chapter, walking through an example of Ursa code to introduce some fundamental programming concepts and skills.
15 December 2023
The tutorial has been expanded, up to a first example of some Ursa code!
The colouring of code examples is now instant, as it’s done when the site is built, rather than in the browser. Behind the scenes, this involved fixes to some of the peripheral Ursalang projects, so they now work better too.
12 December 2023
The language reference is now complete (although still rather terse), and the standard library and JavaScript bindings both have reference pages too.
The web site has been fixed to work correctly with the latest Ursa release.
11 December 2023
Release 0.2.0 is out! It comes with the start of a prelude/standard library, iterators and for loops, more math functions, simple file system access, and internal bug fixes. There are more test programs, and use js, which was broken since 0.0.9, works again, so you can access many JavaScript facilities directly.
Looking forward, I have tagged several issues in GitHub with the 0.3 milestone.
I will shortly be updating the documentation to conform to the 0.2 release (apologies for not doing it before this announcement!), and adding to the tutorial, before I get down to work on version 0.3.
A big thanks to those who have tested Ursa, and made suggestions and requests, especially Alistair Turnbull and Martin Keegan.
16 November 2023
Release 0.1.6 adds long comments, long and literal strings, and bug fixes for bugs that unfortunately crept into the last few releases owing to problems with the tests not being run correctly. The tests have been improved to try to avoid this happening again!
From now on I will not write news items here for minor releases, as the latest release and its release notes are automatically displayed on the home page.
13 November 2023
Ursa has long comments. Note: there’s no new release of Ursa itself, just of the Ohm grammar. The easiest way tgo update is to uninstall and reinstall Ursa. All of the editing modes have also been updated, and the VS Code extension has been published in the Visual Studio Marketplace!
12 November 2023
The tutorial is underway!
11 November 2023
A quick series of releases ending in 0.1.5 improves the code quality in preparation for development towards 0.2. There are some documentation fixes too.
8 November 2023
Release 0.1.1 splits the code base into 3 packages: Ark, the Ohm grammar, and the Ursa compiler/REPL. There’s some minor bug fixes and tidying up, too.
4 November 2023
Release 0.1 reached! This is really just release 0.0.17, made just before, which improves both compile- and run-time error messages. At compile-time, undefined symbols give an error with a source location; meanwhile, run-time errors now show a stack backtrace.
A couple more Rosetta Code tasks have been completed, and the web site’s home page now shows the latest release and its release notes.
31 October 2023
Release 0.0.16 allows let bindings to persist in the REPL, which makes the REPL reasonably usable for the first time. It is possible to have sessions like the following:
Welcome to Ursa 0.0.16.
> let a = 3
3
> a + 4
7
>
30 October 2023
An initial bare-bones version of the language reference is up.
24 October 2023
Release 0.0.15 improves the language in various small ways: simultaneous declarations are now possible with let…and let…, making it easier to write mutually recursive functions. The assignment operator has been changed to :=. Various under-the-hood improvements and fixes have been made.
A new web page of “Ursalang tasks” has been created on Rosetta Code.
19 October 2023
Release 0.0.14 adds some library facilities, and improves the argv interface. The design of the “standard library” is by no means final; the idea is just to make it easy to write somewhat useful Ursa programs! There's a test program syms.ursa in the test directory that lists the words in its input file.
The syntax colouring modes have been updated to colour and, or and not better, typically as keywords.
17 October 2023
Release 0.0.13 adds the support for DOM hacking to Ursa itself, and adds shebang support, so that Ursa scripts can now be run directly by adding a line at the start that says something like #!/usr/bin/env ursa.
The various editing and highlighting modes now support shebang lines, and the Pygments lexer is now a fully-fledged plugin that can be installed with pip like any other Python package.
16 October 2023
Release 0.0.12 fixes some bugs in the Ursa compiler around property access. The web site uses these fixes to simplify the demo of modifying document.
15 October 2023
Release 0.0.11 adds the ability to call methods on JavaScript objects wrapped as Ursa objects. The web version of Ursa exposes the document object to Ursa, and the web site's “Try Ursa!” box now demonstrates this by changing the contents of the web page. Ursa now has bitwise operations, including shifts. There are also fixes and improvements under the hood.
8 October 2023
Release 0.0.10 fixes more bugs, particularly improving the implementation of (Ursa) objects. The rest of the work is under the hood, to support some more exciting changes coming soon!
29 September 2023
Release 0.0.9 fixes some important bugs: variables captured by a closure that is instantiated multiple times now work correctly, and declarations can now be interleaved with expressions.
24 September 2023
The web site now has a news page. I’ve filled in earlier news. From now on it will be in the present tense!
I’ve had a the first code contribution to Ursa from someone else: the author of syntastica, a syntax-highlighting tool based on tree-sitter, is kindly helping me add Ursa to the supported languages; meanwhile, Ali Anvari helped me find a couple of important bugs, one in the interpreter and one in the grammar of Ursa.
23 September 2023
I signed up for and registered “Ursalang” on Rosetta Code, and wrote the first example for Ursa.
22 September 2023
I added syntax highlighting patterns for the GNU Nano editor.
21 September 2023
The Ursa live demo could now produce output as well as show its computed result value.
20 September 2023
A reasonably full set of pages was now live, albeit many of them stubs.
My good friend and programming partner Alistair Turnbull noticed Ursa in his GitHub feed and asked me about it; I’d not mentioned it to him, to see how long it would take him to find out about it!
19 September 2023
After a crash course in webpack I managed to get Ursa working on the web, for a live demo version on the web site. Pleasingly the only change I had to make to Ursa itself was to export one class I needed.
The example code was syntax highlighted with Pygments patterns.
I created the first Matrix rooms for Ursa. One of them was for newbies; Fanì pointed out that we’re all newbies at the moment!
17 September 2023
A skeleton home page for the web site was up. It already included example code.
10 September 2023
The release of version 0.0.7 marked a temporary cessation of development of Ursa itself to work on the ecosystem. I started work on the web site.
I made a trivial VS Code plugin, having previously tried and failed to use the tree-sitter parser with Microsoft’s anycode extension, which I could not make work at all. To console myself I made GtkSourceView patterns, for use with GEdit and other GNOME programs.
8 September 2023
Finally nailed the implementation of variables captured by closures with the two double closures test, the test for which I had overhauled the syntax the day before.
7 September 2023
The syntax got an overhaul, motivated by a test program I wanted to write that was “obviously valid” but failed to parse. I used the ES5 syntax from Ohm as a model. This set a precedent: I have since repeatedly used JavaScript models for syntax highlighting patterns.
5 September 2023
The culmination of a lot of clean-up work, debugging and re-working was a better implementation of symbol references that was fully symbolic (previously, I had been looking up symbols by name at run-time, at least in some circumstances). Another much-rewritten commit (dated 29th August).
24 August 2023
I tweaked the compact-json JSON pretty-printer to work for Ursa, so now I could have nicely formatted Ark.
22 August 2023
A major restructuring of the interpreter: rather than using eval methods of
a class hierarchy of Ursa values, I used a single function. This was easier
to understand and maintain, though it meant that the organization of the
code became rather less consistent.
21 August 2023
I used the new JSON syntax to make the test suite more principled, by having
it compare results against JSON values rather than using print() and
comparing the resultant text.
20 August 2023
I added a JSON syntax for Ark, which soon replaced the sexp-like syntax. One less custom parser to maintain, and Ursa programs and values could easily be serialized and shared with other programs.
The Emacs mode was accepted to MELPA, and Ursa support was now available “off the shelf” in a major editor.
17 August 2023
Conversion of Ursa values to JavaScript was implemented. An important step towards interoperability in the JavaScript environment in which the Ohm implementation of Ursa lives.
13 August 2023
The ursalang organization came into being on GitHub, and I made the first release of Ursa on npm. I also used the tree-sitter grammar to make an Emacs mode.
A red-letter day for Ursa visibility and usability!
12 August 2023
My first foray into Langium. I wanted to implement Ursa with this more sophisticated language building system, which would give me rather more than Ohm, in particular an implementation of web workers, and an LSP server.
However, seeing its complexity I decided to wait until Ursa was a bit more stable.
9 August 2023
The first of a series of early support for editing and syntax highlighting Ursa source code: I started work on my second parser, using the excellent tree-sitter. This helped me better understand my original parser (which wasn’t in great shape).
8 August 2023
I renamed Hak (formerly HakLisp) to Ark, short for the ancient Greek word for a bear, “arktos” (άρκτος).
1 August 2023
I found and named the mascot, Ursula.
30 July 2023
I implemented a basic REPL for the first time. This was part of my plan to make Ursa user-friendly early on.
28 July 2023
I had used the name “Hak” for the language I wanted to build for some time, and it was close to my heart. Friends had made well-reasoned objections; not least, the existence of Haxe and Hack. I finally thought of an alternative name I was happy with, by thinking about possible mascots under the influence of my partner Fanì, who insisted that my new project should be “cute”. “Ursa” is euphonious, short, suggests a bear, and is just short enough to be a file extension.
The file extension was not widely used. The language name, unfortunately, already existed, but, as a general-purpose programming language, only on Rosetta Code for a language that seemed to be an abandoned experiment. (Apologies to the author if this is not the case!) I figured that I could refer to my Ursa as “Ursalang”, using the common contemporary convention, and indeed this turned out to be necessary in various places—the organization name was already taken on GitHub, for example.
In a rapidly-repented step, I renamed HakLisp to Hak. Apologies to anyone trying to understand the early history of the project!
25 July 2023
The first implementation of lexical scope. Even though Hak was meant to be lexically scoped, at first I used dynamic scope, which is simpler to implement, just so I could get the language up and running. I had a set of example programs in both Hak and HakLisp even at this stage!
20 July 2023
I finally stopped rewriting my first commit, and pushed a second. By now I had two languages: Hak, and HakLisp. I was having trouble working out the semantics of the language and its implementation, and decided to work out these problems in a simpler Lisp-like notation. This turned into the compiled representation of the language.
17 June 2023
The first commit to the repo. The language was called “Hak”, and was an idea that I had been working on for longer than I care to remember—I had been working on the design of various programming languages for at least 30 years, but never implemented anything beyond a few experiments! I decided it was finally time to pick one basic idea and implement it. Many of the ideas I had worked on over the years either seemed out of date, not so good any more, or too hard; the latter category included “minimal, malleable language”, of which examples that have made some progress include Seed7 and Pliant.
So, I chose an idea with a smaller scope: a language that is simple but not minimal, familiar to current programmers, and that, once it is mature, will not change.
The other inspiration was the parsing toolkit Ohm, which is based on OMeta, in a lineage that goes all the way back to META II, the famous paper describing which I had finally gotten around to reading a few years ago. I had long wanted to use something like this as the heart of an extensible language, but now I thought I’d just use Ohm to build a language.
Much easier than the last time I had tried implementing a language, the old, extraordinary but primitive extensible stack-based language Forth, which I first used in the mid 1980s. In the early ’90s, I tried writing my own implementation, which still runs today, usually on a Forth-oriented VM, Beetle. For the rest of the ’90s and much of the next 20 years, I was thinking more about VMs than languages. Maybe that was a mistake! I feel like I went round in circles a lot. Certainly, my work had little practical result, aside from the low-level virtual machines Mite, Mit and Bee. Mite was JIT-based and aimed to be a target for conventional compiled languages like C; Mit and Bee had similar ambitions to host most languages, but their implementations were much simpler C interpreters (though they have recently grown more ambitious). Yet Mite only ever ran C (via the LCC compiler)), on a single native architecture (early ARM chips) and Mit and Bee have to date only run Forth!
So, I gathered up my notes on programming languages, some on scraps of paper, which I had started to try to winnow, and put them aside. I reasoned that simply working out of my head and not worrying too much about whether I had the best possible result was more likely to lead to progress. Ohm turned out to be fun, my recent acquaintance with TypeScript made it even more fun, and off I went!
10 June 2023
I first installed Ohm to work on Ursa.