Foreword

“pawn” is a simple, typeless, 32-bit “scripting” language with a C-like syntax. Execution speed, stability, simplicity and a small footprint were essential design criterions for both the language and the interpreter/abstract machine that a pawn program runs on.

An application or tool cannot do or be everything for all users.
This not

other software systems, it also explains the presence of extensive configuration options and macro or scripting languages in applications. My own applications have contained a variety of little languages; most were very simple, some were extensive. . . and most needs could have been solved by a general
purpose language with a special purpose library. Hence, pawn.

The pawn language was designed as a flexible language for manipulating ob- jects in a host application. The tool set (compiler, abstract machine)
were written so that they were easily extensible and would run on different
soft- ware/hardware architectures.

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pawn is a descendent of the original Small C by Ron Cain and James Hendrix, which at its turn was a subset of C. Some of the modifications that I did to Small C, e.g. the removal of the type system and the substitution of pointers by references, were so fundamental that I could hardly call my language a “subset

of C” or a “C dialect” anymore. Therefore, I stripped off the “C” from the title and used the name “Small” for the name of the language in my publication in Dr. Dobb’s Journal and the years since. During development and maintenance of the product, I received many requests for changes. One of the frequently requested changes was to use a different name for the language —searching for information on the Small scripting language on the Internet was hindered by “small” being such a common word. The name change occurred together with a significant change in the language: the support of “states” (and state machines).

I am indebted to Ron Cain and James Hendrix (and more recently, Andy Yuen), and to Dr. Dobb’s Journal to get this ball rolling. Although I must have touched nearly every line of the original code multiple times, the Small C origins are still clearly visible.

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A detailed treatise of the design goals and compromises is in appendix C; here I would like to summarize a few key points. As written in the previous para- graphs, pawn is for customizing applications (by writing scripts), not for writ- ing applications. pawn is weak on data structuring because pawn programs are intended to manipulate objects (text, sprites, streams, queries, . . . ) in the host application, but the pawn program is, by intent, denied direct access to any data outside its abstract machine. The only means that a pawn program has to manipulate objects in the host application is by calling subroutines, so called “native functions”, that the host application provides.

pawn is flexible in that key area: calling functions. pawn supports default val- ues for any of the arguments of a function (not just the last), call-by-reference as well as call-by-value, and “named” as well as “positional” function argu- ments. pawn does not have a “type checking” mechanism, by virtue of being a typeless language, but it does offer in replacement a “classification checking” mechanism, called “tags”. The tag system is especially convenient for function arguments because each argument may specify multiple acceptable tags.

but in their combination. For pawn, I feel that the combination of named ar- guments —which lets you specify function arguments in any order, and default values —which allows you to skip specifying arguments that you are not inter- ested in, blend together to a convenient and “descriptive” way to call (native) functions to manipulate objects in the host application.

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