pokemon-go

2020.85: your programming language that is just a crappy wrapper for Go, where all the keywords are now Pokémon

Running pokemon-go

You will need a Go compiler. To create the compiler, execute the command:

go build -o pokemon-go pokemon_go.go

To run the example code, pokemon_go_example.pgo:

./pokemon-go pokemon_go_example.pgo
go run temp.go

How pokemon-go works

To ensure that we properly tokenize pokemon-go with correct substitution of keywords from Go, we copied over the contents of https://golang.org/src/go/token/token.go and changed the values of the tokens. We also had to create one new keyword, importgo.

Mapping of keyword names

Please check out this Google Sheet for the mapping between all the different keywords in one convenient place.

importgo

We considered just creating a whole new compiler called pokemon-go by changing that token file in the source directory and then building the entire compiler. However, many other Go packages rely on the go keywords and changing those keywords would break how Go processed those files. It would mean we would have to go and update many, if not every, .go file in the repository. Thus, we introduced two ways to import files: one for regular .go files and our new .pgo files.

Converting from pokemon-go to Go

At the moment, pokemon-go functions as a translator by creating a temporary temp.go file and then the user executes that file. Because of the compiled nature of Go as a programming language, it is difficult to execute or evaluate code contained within a string in a program. Other more dynamics languages, like Javascript, have such potentialities natively built in. We are investigating a tigheter integration.

However, this loose integration DOES mean that we have access to all of Go's functionality. For example, one could easily run:

./pokemon-go pokemon_go_example.pgo
go run temp.go

Converting from Go to pokemon-go

We have a utility that lets the user convert from Go to pokemon-go:

go build go2pgo.go

It can then be run as:

./go2pgo.go switch.go switch.pgo

The resulting code can then be run from pokemon-go.

Improvements

We acknowledge that comments are not preserved during the conversion phase from Go to pokemon-go or vice versa.