Jordan Dehmel, jdehmel@outlook.com
github.com/jorbDehmel/oak

Oak is a modern low-level functional programming language with compile-time modifiable syntax. Its usecase is in low-level language and compiler design (see the later section on dialects). Oak also aims to have an integrated build system, necessitating only one call to the compiler per executable.

This git repository contains the source code for the acorn Oak compiler, as well as some standard packages (extra, std, stl, and turtle) and tests suites.

Oak is most closely related to C, but also has strong macro support, modern typing, generics, compile-time syntax modification and integrated package management. An interesting consequence of Oak's compile-time modifiable syntax is that Oak can be a high or low level language, depending on the rules / dialect applied.

Oak has compile-time-modifiable syntax (see the section on preprocessor rules), making it highly customizable and flexible in a way that no other mainstream languages are. In Oak, if you think the language should have a certain shorthand, you can create it. Oak can similarly be a testing ground for new language syntaxes. It supports the creation of "dialects", which are Oak variants which use preprocessor rules to support independent syntactical structures.

Note: Oak has a default syntax, called canonical Oak. It also has the std dialect, provided by the std package. The later is more commonly used. Syntax modifications must be opted into on a file-by-file basis, or specified by the compiler via the use of dialect files.

Oak is not compatible with Windows. Oak assumes a UNIX system.

To install, open a terminal in this folder and run make install. This will compile and install Oak, as well as the standard Oak package. To uninstall, call acorn -A. To update, call acorn -a.

To install all the default Oak packages, run make packages in this folder. If this is not run, only the std package will be installed. More information about the included packages can be found in docs/manual.md.

Oak versions follow the following format.

major release.minor release.patch

As of the time of this writing, Oak is still on major release 0. During this phase of development, Oak is not stable. This means that code written in one minor release or patch is not guaranteed to work in another.

Once Oak moves to major release 1, code written in one patch version will be guaranteed to work in another. Code written in one minor release will most likely work in another. Code written in one major release will have no guarantees about any other.

More help can be found in the full Oak manual, which can be found at ./docs/manual.md. A suite of examples can be found in ./src/tests. Please report any bugs on and forward any specific questions to github.com/jorbDehmel/oak.