Notice

With work and other things in my life, I can no longer develop this project. Seeing as I was the only developer, I am considering it orphaned, until someone else comes along.
I do have another (non OSS) version I am maintaining, along with grammar specifications that are maintained. If you are interested in maintaining this project, message me, and I can help you keep this project in sync.

Elemental Development Toolchain

A complete toolchain based around the Æthere langauge.

Æthere is based on Ada, but incorporates more desktop/server friendly features, as it is not intended for mission critical systems; this would be redundant as Ada does these flawlessly. Rather than having separate Integer, WideInteger, and WideWideInteger types, there is just Integer. This is especially useful when dealing with String. On personal systems, there aren't extensive constraints like there are in microcontroller systems, such as biomedical. In Ada, arrays have to be constrained, or bound; the total size declared beforehand. Working with other languages, I've become very fond of unbound arrays. Now, Ada does have an unbound array type, but I feel, for a non-RT system, this should be default behavior. Ada developers will be completely comfortable in Æthere.

The approach taken here, is unique, and holds as little legacy concepts as possible. There aren't separate tokenizers, lexical scanners, or semantic scanners. Optimization is done outside of the compiler as separate units (this allows vendor supplied optimizers, and optimizers under different licenses). Output is raw binary, and various tools are used to add the metadata, producing formats like ELF or a.out. Most importantly, all of this is handled by a script like program called Builder, which acts as an enhanced project management and build script. Merely fill out some basic information, and Builder calls everything it should.

This is primarily meant as bootstrap code, with the intention of hosting the development of a pure Æthere toolchain. However, it is being developed as a production-level toolchain.