Ven is a programming language that aims to be a flexible medium for thought. Because of this, it has many curious features:

• Extremal cooperation between the parts of the implementation.
• Unrestricted access to the language's internals anywhere and at any point in time.
• Context and constant guesswork (compile-time and runtime alike).
• Interpretation and compilation, together (TODO).

Building Ven

On *nix:

1. Install Crystal, shards and libgmp.
2. Download this repository (via git clone or GitHub's Download ZIP).
3. Unzip if necessary. cd into the downloaded repository.
4. Run shards install to install the libraries Ven depends on.
5. Run shards build --release. IMPORTANT: it is obligatory to have the BOOT environment variable set; it should contain an absolute path to std/ (e.g., /home/user/Downloads/ven/std), orelse building will fail. E.g., if you are using BASH: BOOT=/absolute/path/to/std shards build --release.
6. The executable will be in bin/.

On Windows:

:no_good: Try WSL.

The Ven Pipeline

Imagine a cooperative committee where every member fulfills some job and, at the same time, can ask the other members for help.

• src/ven/world manages the relationships between the committee members; i.e., it is the committee itself.
• src/ven/read is the reader. It processes a file into a series AST nodes (called quotes in Ven), advancing one at a time.
• src/ven/eval is, right now, the only evaluation machinery Ven has. After the reader produces a statement quote, eval evaluates it.
• src/ven/suite/context is, roughly speaking, the context all of this happens in.

Contributing

1. Fork.
2. Commit.
3. PR when ready.