🪙 Copper Programming Language

Copper is a simple, interpreted programming language built entirely in C — designed as a personal project to understand the core principles of compiler and interpreter design, from lexing and parsing to AST evaluation.

This project represents a deep dive into how programming languages actually work under the hood.

🚧 Project Status: In Progress
Core interpreter components are now functional.

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🔩 Core Components

• Lexer – Reads raw source code and converts it into a stream of tokens.
• Parser – Takes the token stream and constructs an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).
• AST – A structured, tree-based representation of the program’s logic.
• Visitor (Interpreter) – Walks the AST and executes the code (currently supports variable assignment and a print() function).
• File I/O – Reads .cop source files directly for execution.

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🗺️ Roadmap

✅ Completed

• Lexer: Convert source text into tokens.
• Parser: Build an AST from tokens.
• Visitor (Evaluator): Execute AST nodes.
• File input and execution support.

🚀 Upcoming Features

• Arithmetic operations (+, -, *, /)
• Control flow (if / else)
• New data types (number, boolean, etc.)
• Error handling and debugging improvements
• REPL (interactive shell)

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⚙️ Getting Started

1. Dependencies

To build and run Copper, you’ll need:

• A C compiler (e.g., gcc)
• make

Windows Users:
Install MSYS2 — it includes gcc, make, and a UNIX-like shell environment.

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2. Building the Project

Clone the repository and navigate to the project folder:

git clone https://github.com/AmalSKumar0/copper.git
cd copper

Build using make:

make

This compiles all .c files, links them, and produces the copper.exe (or ./copper on Linux/macOS).

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3. Running a Copper Program

To execute a Copper source file:

# Windows
.\copper.exe test.cop

# Linux / macOS
./copper test.cop

Example: test.cop

var name = "Hello World!";
print(name);

Expected Output:

Hello World!

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🧰 Makefile Commands

Command	Description
make	Build the copper executable
make install	(Windows) Copies copper.exe to C:/tools — add this folder to your PATH
make clean	Removes the compiled executable and object files

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4. Running a Copper Program After Installing

To execute a Copper source file:

# Windows
copper test.cop

Example: test.cop

var name = "Hello World!";
print(name);

Expected Output:

Hello World!

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🧠 Learning Objective

This project is primarily an educational experiment — to explore:

• Tokenization and lexical analysis
• Recursive descent parsing
• AST construction and traversal
• Interpreter evaluation model

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