lci Documentation

License

lci - a LOLCODE interpreter written in C. Copyright (C) 2010 Justin J. Meza

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Maintainer

The lead maintainer for this project is Justin J. Meza (justin.meza@gmail.com). For more information, check this project's webpage at http://icanhaslolcode.org .

About

lci is a LOLCODE interpreter written in C and is designed to be correct, portable, fast, and precisely documented.

• correct: Every effort has been made to test lci's conformance to the LOLCODE language specification. Unit tests come packaged with the lci source code.
• portable: lci follows the widely ported ANSI C specification allowing it to compile on a broad range of systems.
• fast: Much effort has gone into producing simple and efficient code whenever possible to the extent that the above points are not compromized.
• precisely documented: lci uses Doxygen to generate literate code documentation, browsable here.

Organization

lci employs several different modules which each perform a specific task during interpretation of code:

• lexer (lexer.c, lexer.h)- The lexer takes an array of characters and splits it up into individual lexemes. Lexemes are divided by whitespace and other rules of the language.
• tokenizer (tokenizer.c, tokenizer.h) - The tokenizer takes the output of the lexer and converts it into individual tokens. Tokens are different from lexemes in that a single token may be made up of multiple lexemes. Also, the contents of some tokens are evaluated (such as integers and floats) for later use.
• parser (parser.c, parser.h) - The parser takes the output of the tokenizer and analyzes it semantically to turn it into a parse tree.
• interpreter (interpreter.c, interpreter.h) - The interpreter takes the output of the parser and executes it.

Each of these modules is contained within its own C header and source code files of the same name.

To handle the conversion of Unicode code points and normative names to bytes, two additional files, unicode.c and unicode.h are used.

Finally, main.c ties all of these modules together and handles the initial loading of input data for the lexer.