Everything was going reasonably OK until I got down to that gigantic rat's nest of if-else statements and embedded for loops. OMG

"Outsider art" - that's one of the best descriptions I've heard! You're absolutely right.

Thank you for the book recommendation. I've just downloaded "Crafting Interpreters" and will study it properly. I've been coding in isolation (due to circumstances I can't easily explain), so learning from established resources like this is exactly what I need.

The messiness comes from years of solo experimentation without mentorship. I'm now committed to cleaning it up using proper techniques.

I appreciate both the kind words and the tough love.

Man this is art

It hurts my eyes to see spelling mistakes in error messages. I know English is not your first language, but, dude, in the age of autocorrect and AI, it is sloppy and screams incompetence. Not what you want anybody to see when using your interpreter.

Otherwise, what a cluster*uck of a code this is.. I am amazed and appalled at the same time.

I know the source code is messy and not clean. I promise I'll clean it up. I'm sorry about it, but when I was coding, my country had serious problems and coding was my escape.

Honestly, my code is like my school notes. Even my teachers can't read my notes during exams! They always say: "The answers are right, but the handwriting... ah!"

I'll make it better.

Good man. Like I said, it's obvious you're going places.

D is a good language. You chose well. Walter Bright would be happy to see what you're doing here.

If you're not using version control yet, now's a good time to start, as it will help with the cleanup work. Fossil is my favorite as it's easier to use than git, but whatever you like is fine. More people use git than fossil so it's good to learn it and master it. It's very easy to introduce some kind of subtle bug in situations like this, but with version control you can check carefully after each change to make sure the code still works properly, and if not, easily see the problem and fix it or revert and try again.

clang-format would be the perfect tool for this also, even though it's not designed to work on D. The language is close enough to C++ in syntax that it should do the job, at least helping you get rid of the brackets in one go without screwing anything up too much. I recommend basing your styling on the "Microsoft" preset and customizing from there. That's also known as the "Allman" style, with the brackets starting on their own lines. With the brackets lined up like this it helps to see where code blocks begin and end. But you can use whatever style you like of course, just experiment and see what looks good to you.

Ultimately it comes down to just Doing the Right Thing. Sometimes that's the same as following established patterns, and sometimes it means breaking them. As you gain more experience you'll figure it out.

I think HN lets you post the same link once a month, so spend a while cleaning it up good and making it look as pretty as you can, then post it up again next month, on a Friday or Saturday to get more eyes on it. Send me the link when you do and I'll have another look. Here's my email:

domain: killthe.net

name: dave

Here's a good clang-format config file to get you started:

http://killthe.net/clang-format

Use it like this, from your source directory.

  find -name '*.d' | xargs clang-format --style=file:clang-format -i

Just make sure to have a backup copy first, or version control, before running that command as it might screw things up.