I'm currently working on an experiment where I'm implementing an interpreter for an old in-game scripting language. It's a forth based language, so I figure it would be fairly easy to just have the instructions (once verified and santized) put into a big list.
Once I've got the code in a list, I am trying to iterate through the entire program in a for loop that processes the instructions one at a time. Certain items, like strings, could be placed onto a variable that holds the current stack, which is easy enough. But where I'm stuck is making commands happen.
I have a big list of functions that are valid and I'd like it to where if any instruction matches them, it calls the associated function.
So, for example, if I had:
"Hello, world!" notify
...the code would check for notify in a list and then execute the notify function. The bottom line is: How do I translate a string into a function name?
You could keep a dictionary of functions the code can call, and then do a look up when you need to:
def notify(s):
print(s)
d = {"notify": notify}
d["notify"]("Hello, world!")
You can do it through locals which is a dictionary with th current local symbol table:
locals()["notify"]()
or though globals which returns a dictionary with the symbol table of globals:
globals()["notify"]()
You can give arguments too e.g.:
locals()["notify"]("Hello, world!")
or
globals()["notify"]("Hello, world!")
If you have a dict
called commands
that maps names to functions, you can do it like this:
def my_notify_function():
print(stack.pop)
commands = {'notify': my_notify_function, ...}
for item in program:
if item in commands:
commands[item]()
else:
stack.push(item)
Something like:
import re
class LangLib(object):
pattern = re.compile(r'"(.*?)" (.*)')
def run_line(self, line):
arg, command = re.match(LangLib.pattern, line).groups()
return getattr(self, command)(arg)
def notify(self, arg):
print arg
Then your engine code would be:
parser = LangLib()
for line in program_lines:
parser.run_line(line)
Create a dictionary of function names and some tags.
I have tried it several times before, it works really well.