HAL+HTK = HAUL1

HotKey's Average Language and HAL Translation Kernels

About

The goal of HAUL is to have a piece of code that can translate itself into any other language. (See also: Transpiler, Quine, LLVM, etc.)

HAUL1 consists of the language HAL (HotKey's Average Language) and HTKs (HAL Translation Kernels) which can translate that HAL language into other scripting languages.

HAUL1 can also translate its own source code, which makes things really mind boggling...

Oh, and it comes with ShadowRunner, a simple VM that is written in HAL and which can be programmed for using HAL. A nice strange loop, don't you think?

The whole thing is kept very simple. It kind of combines the worst of PHP and Assembly in one package - a nightmare to program in. Well, it was just a proof of concept. ;-)

History

HAUL1 was in development 2011-07 - 2012-03. It has long been superseded by HAUL2 and HAUL3 which are written in Python and come with much more powerful lexers and parsers.

Features and Limitations

• "Flat" translation: no lexer, compiler or AST - just a simple text-translator
• First word in each line is always the command, followed by tab separated parameters
• Written in PHP :-(
• Some kind of structure/state while parsing (instructions, expressions, ...), but no "understanding" of the code
• OOP (HTKs are classes)
• Sample Code: "shadowRunner" - a small VM
• "HYBERnation" - Programs can store their state across translations!
• Goodie: SR1 can convert HAL to shadowRunner byte code!! "YO DAWG! I HEARD YOU LIKE POLYMORPHISM..."
• Works great for what it does!
• roughly 600 lines (12kb) per translation kernel
• Language is really ugly (an "assembler php hate child") - no nested expressions, looks repetitive, generally unpleasant to code in.
• Needs a boot-strapper to initially translate itself to an executable language (translateOnce.php)
• limited syntax (assembler like - the worst quirks of all output languages combined!)
• parsing is a bit messy, since we have no syntax tree
• Can only output languages that are similar in their syntactic structure (PHP, Python, JS, VBS, ...)

Maybe some sort of syntax tree is not bad after all... Especially for binary output.

Usage

• Write your code in HAL (see src.hal for examples)
• Pick an output language (JS, PHP, VBS, SR), see src.hal/htk_*.hal for a selection
• Use run_deploy.php to translate the HTK for your desired language to PHP and invoke it on your own source file. This results in your source file being translated to any of the destination languages.
• Use run_shadowRunner.php to translate your source to ShadowRunner byte code and run it inside a ShadowRunner VM on the desired target platform.