When I am not at work, writing multimedia SDK samples and documentation, I am at home working on my side project: the Cat programming language. I have just recently released a nearly stable version (0.9.9) of the interpreter written in C# at http://www.cat-language.com/download.html. I am hoping that people will find it useful or interesting, and share their feedback with me.

Cat is a bit of an odd-duck in that it is both a functional programming language (like Scheme, Haskell, and ML) and it is also a stack-based language (like Forth, and Postscript). This combination isn't unique (other examples include Joy and Factor), however it also has an optional type system. The current interpreter doesn't do type-checking but there is a formal description available at http://www.cat-language.com/semantics.html. I plan on implementing the type checker in version 2.0.

I've released Cat into the public domain, so you can use it for any purpose commercial or otherwise without restriction (and of course warrantee). I should make clear too that this has nothing to do with my employer, Microsoft, and is simply something that I do on my own.

Please feel free to share with me your thoughts, suggestions or questions!