Ye! The Yeti Programming Language

A programming language implementation to explore the internals of how programming languages work.

Ye! is not production-ready programming language; instead, it is a living experiment to uncover the secrets like:

• How programming languages are built
• What happens under the hood, from source code to execution
• The structure of lexers, parsers, ASTs, code generation, and more

🔍 Goals

• Understand the lifecycle of a program from source code to execution
• Experiment with building language features from scratch
• Learn about language design, syntax rules, parsing, and code generation
• Explore compiler theory with practical, iterative code

🚧 Current Status

Ye! is in active exploration mode. The following are planned or implemented:

• Basic lexer
• Parser and AST
• Minimal grammar (variables, addition, printing)
• Typed AST generation
• Error reporting, debugging aids
• REPL / CLI tools
• Bytecode or RISC-V backend

🗃️ Example

// sample code file code.ye
let x := 10 
let y := 20

// comparison
if (x < y) {
  println("x is smaller than y");
} else {
  println("y is smaller than x");
}

// recursive function 
fun factorial(n) {
  if n <= 1 {
    return 1;
  } else {
    return n * factorial(n - 1)
  }
}
// function call 
println(factorial(5));

Notes:

• A lot can change on the fly as this is under active development