Language-Tranquility

The language-tranquility extension for Visual Studio Code provides language support for the Tranquility language developed at Drexel University by Professor Brian Stuart.

Features

The extension ships with several features, including

Syntax highlighting
Documentation hovering
- Docuentation for built-in functions
- Documentation for reserved keywords
Linting
- Errors
  - Unrecognized token type
  - Unexpected token type
  - Referencing an variable that is not defined
  - Duplicate identifier names (including naming a function/variable to the name of a built-in function)
  - Calling a function with the incorrect number of arguments
  - Creating a loop without an until statement
- Warnings
  - Unused variables

Windows Setup

The Tranquility compiler is a Linux executable and a native version for Windows does not exist. As such, any Windows users will have to adjust certain parts of their code to be Linux-compatible and compile/run the files themselves on a virtual Linux machine.

Newlines

If you are on Windows, you will need to ensure your new lines do not include carriage returns. On MacOS and Linux, new lines are written as \n, but on Windows they include a carriage return and are coded as \r\n. The Tranquility compiler is written in Linux and unlike most languages does not ignore new lines, and specifically expects \n characters. To set newlines to only \n in Visual Studio Code:

Navigate to %appdata% > Code > User > settings.json
Enter the following line in the top-level of the file:

{
    ...
    "files.eol": "\n",
    ...
}

Visual Studio Code will now process new lines as \n. This is necessary to write Tranquility code. If you're in an existing project that had carriage returns by default, press the CRLF button in the bottom right of the window and switch to LF.

Compilation

Compiling Tranquility is only possible on a Linux machine. To compile tranquility on windows, it is most common to use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Start by installing WSL.

Next, NodeJS and the wget command need to be installed:

>> wsl
$ cd ~
$ sudo apt-get install nodejs
$ sudo apt-get install wget

Next, the Tranquility run command must be registered. Download setup.bash and place it anywhere. In the location of the setup file, open CMD or Powershell, run wsl to enter WSL, and run bash ./setup.bash. This will download all of the necessary scripts; Specifically the tranquility compiler, MTVM, and the tranquility runner. After this operation is complete you can delete setup.bash by navigating to the folder you put it in (if you're not already there) and running rm setup.bash. Each time you want to compile, run wsl.

Usage

To compile, run tranquility <filename>.t.