Crystal Lox

A Crystal implementation of Lox from Crafting Interpreters from Chapter 1 to 13 with the goal of matching the behaviour to be as close as possible to the original Java implementation.

Running a simple Fibonacci Sequence program gives the following:

Requirements

• Crystal 1.6.2
• Python 3.10.8

Setup

Set the permissions of the run and test script:

$ sudo chmod +x ./run.sh
$ sudo chmod +x ./test.sh

Usage

Create a hello_world.lox file:

print "Hello World!"

Run the script:

$ ./run.sh hello_world.lox
Dependencies are satisfied
Building: lox-lang-crystal
Hello World!

Testing

Run the following command:

$ ./test.sh chap13_inheritance

Why?

I've implemented this in C#, but that language was too similar to Java. It means that I couldn't fully understand the fundermentals of language design. My thought was if I used an unfamilar programming language, then I first must understand what the material is explaining and how it works, then I can implement it. For some reason, I thought this would also be a good chance to learn Crystal.