The Hare programming language has several syntactic constructs we can lower at compiletime once we've resolved the declared types. So how might our string-centric CPU do so?
For starters the `defer` statement should enqueue their expressions into a block to be pasted immediately before any exits from the current block, since computers are a lot better at remembering to do these things than humans!
Also the `?` or `!` postfix operators branches on the operand to see if its an error.
1/3?
Hare distinguishes error types using a `!`, so it can offer those valuable operators.
Talking about types, array indexing & union/struct properties can be lowered to pointer arithmetic. Once we've computed type sizes & (via a running sum) offsets for each struct property, with caching to aid computing this in the correct order.
In this hypothetical I'd output constant expressions.
Some builtin functions would compile to this computed data, though these builtins deserve their own thread!
2/3!
Finally upon comparing strings we should synthesize calls to a `strcmp` runtime function, so it compare the integral result to 0.
And at some point in this compilation I'd want to inline simpler functions so our microcontroller APIs can be optimized to single opcodes.
All of this should be doable by our hypothetical Parsing & Output Units, though the results would require a later constant folding optimization.
3/3 Fin for today!
