Ritchie Language

Ritchie is an expressive and efficient language for the C ecosystem. Ritchie uses C libraries natively and generates easy to understand C code. It is named after the great computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, if not for whom we would all be programming in Visual Basic.

There are five core principles behind Ritchie:

1. Ease of programming, inspired by Python
2. Fast, like C code
3. Type safety, like Scala
4. Ability to go lower level and write C code
5. No reserved keywords, everything is redefinable

We ran the prime counting benchmark for Ritchie, C and Python. Here's what we got:

The best way to introduce yourself to this language is to take a look at some of the examples and try running them. Ritchie is still in early development; many features have not yet been fully implemented or described. A list of major development tasks remaining can be found in the wiki.

Features

• Ritchie uses type inferencing, so the boilerplate Java statement:

Point point = new Point (x,y)

becomes a short Ritchie statement:

point = Point x, y

Identifiers have their type inferred when they are first used and their type cannot be changed after that. In the above example, point gets type Point.

• Ritchie tries to follow English linguistic constructs, so, most of Ritchie language expressions take the form:

  Subject Verb Object

  The following phrase:

hello = "Hello"

parses as:

• Ritchie has no keywords. There are many symbols with predefined meanings, but the intention of Ritchie is to have all those symbols redefineable. Currently Ritchie has been developed with a standard dialect of Ritchie in mind, and to that effect many symbols work as keywords might otherwise have in other languages. For example to define a class in Ritchie, you would type

SomeClass :: SomeBaseClass

The :: is simply a verb that reads "become a subclass of".

• We call verbs what the constructs called functions, methods or subroutines in other languages. For example:

Integer : factorial Integer n
	result = 1
	i for 1,n+1
		result = result * i
	-> result

print factorial 5

There's no assignment operator in Ritchie, but = is defined as an assignment verb for Identifier.

• A special type of verb is a control flow verb.

if, while and for in Ritchie are all such verbs. They are not keywords, as you can redefine them, although this is probably not a good idea.

• Ritchie is whitespace sensitive

Get started

1. Build the ritchie compiler make clean;make
2. Write your ritchie program in your favourite text editor (let's call it program.rit)
3. Set RITCHIE_HOME export RITCHIE_HOME=/path/to/ritchie
4. Run ${RITCHIE_HOME}/ritchie.sh program.rit and ritchie will build, execute and run the program

Team

Ritchie Language is being developed by a group of efficiency obsessed programmers for demanding programmers who want both the conciseness of Python and the efficiency of C.

Concept: Rohana Rezel (Riolet Corporation)

Design and implementation: Joe Pelz, Phillip Hood and Dimitry Rakhlei (final year students at BCIT, Burnaby, BC, Canada)