Come to think of it, this is an excellent opportunity for even broader interop! Just make the compiler parse any series of, say, 5+ consecutive !?,.+-[] characters not as a parse error but a Brainfuck expression! What could possibly go wrong?
Wrt the "_" and the ".", if those are documented at all, maybe make the other sections in the docs (eg the one on destructors) link back to there. I didn't read the docs from top to bottom, instead preferring to refer to them when I saw code I didn't understand. I bet I'm not the only one that likes to learn like that. Note that everything I write here is intended as a friendly suggestion and feel free to ignore all of it. I'm just a random guy from the internet.
Finally, wrt casting: I've always found that C-style "(type)" casts are weird and messy and don't fit the rest of the feel of the code. I wonder why you took them over? You also have "as" for dynamic-casting, and personally I think those are a lot more readable. Did you consider stealing some ideas from Kotlin and TypeScript wrt this to unify the two? Let me know if I'm stepping over a creative boundary here, but I'm personally quite mesmerized by Kotlin's !! operator[0], which simply forces a value to be not-null and throws otherwise. That's essentially what "(int)foo" does in Beef when foo can't be casted to an int, correct?
Then, if Beef had such an operator, then prefix casts would be semantically equivalent to "(foo as int)!!", right? Or maybe even the super-nice-on-the-eyes "foo as int!!" if precedence rules allow. Obviously a naive compilation of that would be slower (a dynamic cast followed by an if-null), but it seems like a pretty simple optimization to add.
Maybe "foo as .!!" could even be shortened to "foo!".
Given that you have int? and ?? and ?. already, I could imagine you considered something like this already and decided against it? Sorry for the rambling :)
Again, great job! Really looking forward to playing around with it more. Still totally blown away by the completeness of all this. I can't understand how a single person can pull all of this off on their own time.
I was a bit puzzled by the SDL2 wrapper by the way (SDL2.bf) - I can't find any place where it refers to a .lib or even a .dll file. How does this work? I tried to find a Visual Studio-esque "project settings" screen with deeply hidden list of .lib files but to no avail. How does Beef know where SDL is?
Come to think of it, this is an excellent opportunity for even broader interop! Just make the compiler parse any series of, say, 5+ consecutive !?,.+-[] characters not as a parse error but a Brainfuck expression! What could possibly go wrong?
Wrt the "_" and the ".", if those are documented at all, maybe make the other sections in the docs (eg the one on destructors) link back to there. I didn't read the docs from top to bottom, instead preferring to refer to them when I saw code I didn't understand. I bet I'm not the only one that likes to learn like that. Note that everything I write here is intended as a friendly suggestion and feel free to ignore all of it. I'm just a random guy from the internet.
Finally, wrt casting: I've always found that C-style "(type)" casts are weird and messy and don't fit the rest of the feel of the code. I wonder why you took them over? You also have "as" for dynamic-casting, and personally I think those are a lot more readable. Did you consider stealing some ideas from Kotlin and TypeScript wrt this to unify the two? Let me know if I'm stepping over a creative boundary here, but I'm personally quite mesmerized by Kotlin's !! operator[0], which simply forces a value to be not-null and throws otherwise. That's essentially what "(int)foo" does in Beef when foo can't be casted to an int, correct?
Then, if Beef had such an operator, then prefix casts would be semantically equivalent to "(foo as int)!!", right? Or maybe even the super-nice-on-the-eyes "foo as int!!" if precedence rules allow. Obviously a naive compilation of that would be slower (a dynamic cast followed by an if-null), but it seems like a pretty simple optimization to add.
Maybe "foo as .!!" could even be shortened to "foo!".
Given that you have int? and ?? and ?. already, I could imagine you considered something like this already and decided against it? Sorry for the rambling :)
Again, great job! Really looking forward to playing around with it more. Still totally blown away by the completeness of all this. I can't understand how a single person can pull all of this off on their own time.
I was a bit puzzled by the SDL2 wrapper by the way (SDL2.bf) - I can't find any place where it refers to a .lib or even a .dll file. How does this work? I tried to find a Visual Studio-esque "project settings" screen with deeply hidden list of .lib files but to no avail. How does Beef know where SDL is?
[0] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/null-safety.html#the--...