C-COW-Interpreter

An interpreter for the COW language, written in C.

• Language specification
• Commented "Hello word" example

How to use

• Compile
  • cd in the project's folder
  • make or gcc cow-interpreter.c -o cow-interpreter
• Run
  • cd in the project's folder
  • ./cow-interpreter <file_path>
    • The argument is the path to a COW source file
    • You can use ./cow-interpreter examples/hello_world_commented.cow

If you're on Windows you'll need to install at least GCC, which can be obtained as part of MinGW (remember to add path\to\MinGW\bin to PATH).

Notes

• The "Hello world" programs you find online may show the wrong character in place of the space between the words. This happens if ASCII 160 is used instead of ASCII 32 for the space character.
• The "Fibonacci" example you find on COW website will result in an infinite loop. Since also the JS interpreter hangs, I think the example is designed that way.

TODO

• Implement MOO
• Implement moo
• Implement STDIN-related commands
• Allow reading source code from a file
• Fix 99 bottles
• Fix Hello World
• Simplify comments syntax in the Hello World example
• Add links to programs to try
• Add tests
• Make sure code follows best practices (enum, const, define, etc.)
• Remove "TODO" comments in the code
• Create a jump table for MOO and moo to avoid looping through the instructions array evey time
• Dinamically allocate memory for the instructions array, to avoid using MAX_NUMBER_OF_INSTRUCTIONS and wasting memory

Ideas

• Create a tool which creates a HTML page with the instructions with different colors and hovbering the mouse explains what it does
• Create a tool which allows to visualize what every instruction does (visualize memory)
• Create a VS Code extension to highlight commands properly