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Whoa, get ready to spend your whole afternoon tooling around with a small pile of little languages and compilers. I am completely hooked on Idst, a compiler for a hybrid prototype-based Smalltalk-plus-C language by Ian Piumarta. And atop the bedrock of Idst: the soda languages.

I first heard about Ian’s stuff in a #camping discussion where Pepsi (the Smalltalk/C hybrid) was brought up. Well, it turns out Idst also comes with a Lisp-like soda language called Jolt (see examples/jolt.) Other examples are just great and include a teensy Squeak VM (examples/sqvm) and some X11 samples (examples/x11.)

He explains the Pepsi syntax in an interview a few days ago on the Weekly Squeak:

You can mix C-code and ���Id��� code in a very simple way. So it is easy to integrate with O.S. services. The idea is quite the opposite of Objective-C: you think in terms of objects all the time (as in SmallTalk). Then you ���come back��� to C-Language for the dirty part of your work.

The syntax is suprisingly terse. You use curly braces to break out into a method written in C. Square brackets for Smalltalk-style.

 X11Display newWindow [ ^X11Window withDisplay: self ]
 X11Display _createSimpleWindow_: _x _: _y _: _w _: _h _: _bw _: _b _: _bg
 {
 return (oop)XCreateSimpleWindow((Display *)self->v__dpy,
 DefaultRootWindow((Display *)self->v__dpy),
 (int)v__x, (int)v__y, (int)v__w, (int)v__h,
 (int)v__bw, (int)v__b, (int)v__bg);
 }
 X11Display createWindow: bounds borderWidth: borderWidth 
 border: border background: background
 [
 ^self newWindow
 _win_: (self _createSimpleWindow_: (bounds _x) _: (bounds _y) 
 _: (bounds _w) _: (bounds _h)
 _: borderWidth _integerValue
 _: border _integerValue
 _: background _integerValue)
 ]

Can you get over that?