1 Introduction
2 ============
3
4 Lichen is a Python-like language and toolchain. The language foregoes various
5 dynamic aspects of Python to provide a foundation upon which more predictable
6 programs can be built, while preserving essential functionality to make the
7 core of the language seem very much like Python. The general syntax is largely
8 identical to Python, with only certain syntactic constructs being unsupported.
9
10 The toolchain employs existing tokeniser and parser software to obtain an
11 abstract syntax tree which is then inspected to provide data to support
12 deductions about the structure and nature of a given program. With the
13 information obtained from these processes, a program is then constructed,
14 consisting of a number of source files in the target compilation language
15 (which is currently the C programming language). This generated program may be
16 compiled and run, hopefully producing the intended results.
17
18 Contact, Copyright and Licence Information
19 ==========================================
20
21 See the following Web pages for more information about this work:
22
23 http://projects.boddie.org.uk/Lichen
24
25 The author can be contacted at the following e-mail address:
26
27 paul@boddie.org.uk
28
29 Copyright and licence information can be found in the docs directory - see
30 docs/COPYING.txt and docs/gpl-3.0.txt for more information.