XIDEK provides technical guidance and source code so that you can readily design and implement an interpreter according to your own requirements. You may need, for example, to create a special interpreter for a domain specific language, script language, or other "little language".

XIDEK can save you weeks or months of work. It gives you parsers, support modules, explanations, examples, organization and a framework upon which you can build.

• The kit provides fully functioning, documented interpreters with standard language features which you can use as a base to start from.
• Interpreters are built using a small but complete collection of reusable, extensible parsing and support modules. These modules implement standard expression and statement syntax, including control statements; symbol tables; abstract syntax trees; and simple bytecode interpreters. This modularity facilitates comparison of techniques and minimizes learning time.
• Interpreters are extensible: The kit has been carefully designed so that you can add (or subtract) your own language features one by one without cluttering the code. You can steadily build your own interpreter on a step by step basis without ever losing control.
• Examples are presented to show just how to add new features to your language.
• The interpreters are implemented as functions, not standalone programs. They are designed to be linked into and called from a host program. The host program can set the values of variable before running a script and can interrogate values after the script terminates, thus allowing close coupling between the host program and the interpreter.

The kit is being made available by Parsifal Software under the zlib/libpng license, a simple license which permits free use, including use in commercial applications. See the listing of approved licenses maintained by the Open Source Initiative. A copy of the license may be viewed here.

XIDEK FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Complete XIDEK documentation may be browsed online here.

To explore the example code online, click here.

The directory structure of the kit is explained here.

Download complete source code and documentation for the XIDEK kit:
xidek-1_0.zip (1.4 MB)
xidek-1_0.tar.gz (1.1 MB)