The Stone Programming Language

Stone is a multi-paradigm programming language. It combines the ideas of object-oriented, functional, and actor-based languages. It is a typed language, with immutability and strictness by default.

This is a very new language, but I've been thinking about the design of the language for quite some time. The design documents can be found in docs/design.

Goals

I have several goals that I keep in mind when designing and implementing Stone. My top-level goals are:

• Have fun
• See if I can make something useful
• Make a general-purpose language
• Keep the language high-level
• Correctness is more important than speed

For more details, see the Goals in the design documents.

Specifications

The language is described in Markdown, with code blocks showing example code. The code blocks also show the expected result of evaluating the code. This is also used as the language specification — all the example code is checked to ensure that it evaluates to the expected result. These can be found in docs/specs.

Building

We're using standard make to build the system.

Currently, we're using Ruby for all pieces of Stone, so you won't need to actually run a build step to get a stone binary.

You can verify that the specs are all passing:

make verify-specs

Running

Binaries are located in the bin directory:

• stone
  • stone eval - Output the result of each top-level expression (non-interactive REPL)
  • stone repl - Accept interactive manual input, and show the result of each top-level expression
  • stone verify - Verify that results of top-level expressions match expectations in comments
  • stone parse - Output the parse tree

License

Stone is released under the MIT license. See the license file for details.

Thanks

Thanks to some advice from my friends in the STL Polyglots group in selecting the name. Especially Deech.