sectivum

Sectivum

A Perl-inspired language for writing Ethereum contracts. With a hint of inspiration from c++.

(Pssst, It compiles Serpent [aka CLL], too)

Try It Out!

You can give it a try @ http://sectivum.io/

Just hit the "compile" tab, and you'll have options to compile from there, without having to install the whole application.

As of this update, it's PoC-4/Poc-4.5 compatible (and almost ready for PoC5)

Installation

Requires:

• Node.JS
• NPM (NodeJS Package Manager)

Need some help? Check out the Node.JS site, or you might be able to search in your distro's package manager.

To install:

git clone https://github.com/dougbtv/sectivum.git
npm install

Usage at the command line

To compile from a source file:

node sectivum.js -f example.sec

You can also bring up a command line, and compile from a source file there with the load command:

[user@host sectivum]$ node sectivum.js 
sectivum.cli > load example.sec

Or, compile interactively:

sectivum.cli > parse $a=5;
Output: PUSH 5 PUSH 0 MSTORE  

You can quit the command line by issuing a quit (or exit) command.

You can get some help by running with the --help flag:

[user@host sectivum]$ node sectivum.js --help

Usage: node sectivum.js [options]

Options:
   -f FILE, --file FILE               Compile given file
   -str "STRING", --string "STRING"   Compile from a string
   -c, --cli                          start CLI
   -s, --server                       start server for RESTful API

Usage via web application

Check out the docs/*.config files for both an nginx & apache configuration for running the web server.

When you're ready just issue:

node sectivum.js --server

May I suggest also using forever? It's a great way to keep a node app up and running.

• More docs on the way for setting up running your instance of the web application, and also complete docs for making requests to the RESTful API.

Syntax

You'll find that the syntax is rather Perl/PHP inspired, including:

• Semicolon ; line terminators
• { Curly braces } for defining blocks
• Lets you organize whitespace how you'd like in your code
• Rather friendly towards strings (more work to do there, though)
• Very comment friendly, we use // for single lines, and /* comment */ for block comments

Let's take a very basic example:

// This is a comment.
// Here we set a variable.
$a = 15;
// Use some flow-control / conditionals
if ($a > 14) {
    $b = $a + 1;
    $c = $a + 2;
}
$a = $b * $a;

If you're used to the syntax, it should be pretty straight forward.

Now let's look at the C++ inspired pre-processing for defines.

#define MYCONSTANT 10
$foo = MYCONSTANT;

As you can see, you can set a constant, so you can clean up some magic numbers from your code.

(More docs to come in terms of syntax)

Coming soon

• PoC5 compatibility
• Better defining of functions (broken right now, but it's ready)
• Creating richer data structures using contract storage
• Better docs for the web app features.
• For loops
• Better output from the parser when you've got a mistake in your code.

Namesake

After Perl, specifically for the "pearl onion" a variety of which is known as sectivum. In latin it means "sectioned" or "severed", we can assume that this makes reference to the layers of an onion.

Originally inspired by the Ethereum Compiler for CLL -> https://github.com/ethereum/compiler