bcc (ACS/ACS95/BCS compiler)

[Positron]

Happy Halloween, everyone!

bcc is a compiler I've been developing for some time now, and I decided that I should finally give it some exposure on this forum.

bcc attempts to compile three languages: ACS, ACS95, and BCS. ACS is the latest version of ACS as defined by the latest version of acc. ACS95 is the original ACS language developed for Hexen. BCS is an extension of ACS.

BCS is mostly compatible with ACS and provides many extra features, including the following:

• Structures
• Enumerations
• Namespaces
• Preprocessor
• Strong types
• References (limited support)
• Block scoping
• Optional function parameters
• Logical-AND (&&) and Logical-OR (||) are short-circuited
• foreach loop
• Nested functions
• Conditional operator (?:)

An overview of the features can be found in the details file. Example code demonstrating some of the new features can be found in the test directory.

Please give the compiler a try. I appreciate any feedback. Right now, the characteristics of some of the features are fluid. I'm going to take the next few weeks to read your responses before I finalize the features.

This is a big project, and a long time has passed since the last release, so bugs are inevitable. Let me know if you spot any. I will fix them as soon as I can.

Download (Windows binaries): https://github.com/wormt/bcc/releases
Source code: https://github.com/wormt/bcc

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If you used a previous version of bcc, there are some breaking changes: block scoping is not enabled by default; regions were replaced with namespaces; format blocks were replaced with message-building functions.

ACS compatibility is important to me. There are a lot of projects out there. I don't want to ignore this user base.

I did keep short-circuit evaluation and underscore as a digit separator. I checked out some projects and didn't see any places where short-circuiting breaks existing code, so I thought that I might as well keep it. As for using the underscore as a digit separator, the underscore is used to separate the base from the value in a radix constant in ACS. I didn't know about radix constants until after I implemented the digit separator feature. Radix constants are such a rare feature that I thought I might as well keep the underscore digit separator and slightly change the syntax of radix constants.

[ZzZombo]

Awesome, man! My hero! I use BCC exclusively, well, used to use when I had been modding.

[Nash]

One of the reasons why I use gdcc-acc was it promised to be "acc but better" and it was indeed effortless to just do a straight copy-pasta of your existing ACS, run it through gdcc-acc and "it just works". And of course from there, I can use the extras like structs, enums etc while still keeping my ACS code style. There's code in my project that's literally several years old before gdcc-acc was invented that I continue to use today with gdcc-acc without problems and without having to re-write anything.

How are things in that regard with bcc? Can I literally just run my existing ACS into it?

[Positron]

One of the reasons why I use gdcc-acc was it promised to be "acc but better" and it was indeed effortless to just do a straight copy-pasta of your existing ACS, run it through gdcc-acc and "it just works". And of course from there, I can use the extras like structs, enums etc while still keeping my ACS code style. There's code in my project that's literally several years old before gdcc-acc was invented that I continue to use today with gdcc-acc without problems and without having to re-write anything.

How are things in that regard with bcc? Can I literally just run my existing ACS into it?

Hey, Nash.

Your old code should work well for the most part. One thing to keep in mind is that the && and || operators are short-circuited, where's in ACS they are not. Radix constants also have a slightly different syntax, but I doubt many even heard of these. You might also have name collisions because some new keywords have been added, but it is unlikely.

If you want to use BCS, which is ACS with the extra features, you'll need to pass the following command-line argument: -x bcs. Alternatively, you can end your script files with a .bcs file extension. The compiler will determine the language to use from the file extension. Any other file extension will make bcc compile your script code like acc.

[Positron]

I fixed some bugs and made another release. For minor releases, check out: https://github.com/wormt/bcc/releases.

[Jroc]

How are things in that regard with bcc? Can I literally just run my existing ACS into it?

I personally have used BCC to compile many acs projects I've done without issues.