pcse

pcse is a tree-walk interpreter for the the programming language known as "pseudocode" in the IGCSE Computer Science 0478 course, written in C++17.

Why did you make this?

At the school I go to, the students are taught some Java before they are taught pseudocode so they get the fundamentals of programming down.

I noticed that many of my fellow students disliked pseudocode, but liked Java. So obviously, I wanted to know why.

I found out the reason they liked Java was because they could actually run it and see the impact of the code they wrote; whereas pseudocode is simply something to write down, that doesn't actually do anything. After I realised that, I realised that an interpreter for the language could really help future students.

I've always wanted to write a programming language, so I decided to try it.

Getting Started

In the future, there will be a VSCode extension to make installing easy. Since pcse is still in development, it must be built from scratch.
Note that these instructions are written so that (hopefully) a non-programmer can follow them. If you have trouble understanding anything, please open an issue!

Prerequisites

Install git and a C++ compiler. (Note that the compiler must support C++17.) Then, install CMake. (Optional) If you want to run the tests, install Catch2.

Building

Open a terminal, and clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/virchau13/pcse

Then run these commands:

cd pcse
cmake .
make

After the commands have finished, pcse will be built. In order to use it, you can write your code in a file in that directory, and then run ./pcse <filename> in a terminal.

Documentation and Examples

Documentation can be found in docs/, and examples can be found in examples/. You can run a specific example by doing ./pcse examples/filename.pcse.

What is there left to do?

• [x] lexer
• [x] parser
• [x] interpreter
• [x] CLI
• [x] VSCode extension