true
'''Arturo''' is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm language that aims to be simple, modern and powerful, vaguely inspired by various other ones - including but not limited to Ruby, Haskell, D, SDL (Simple Declarative Language), Tcl and Lisp.
Principles
It is built on some very simple and straightforward principles:
=Everything is a simple statement=
There are no "special" language constructs (''even if is nothing but a simple statement''). Everything you see is a statement in the form ID
Code is data - and data is code
Arturo can be used both as a data-interchange format and a programming language. Basically all data structures are valid code and all code can be represented as a data structure. Think of it as SDL/Json/YAML/XML combined with the power of Lisp - but without the... sea of opening and closing parentheses.
=Each statement returns a value=
Whether what you would consider a "function" or any other statement, it will return a value. If it's a block of code (see: ''function''), the last statement's result will be return - unless specified otherwise.
Functions are first-class citizens
Functions - or blocks of statements enclosed in {} - can be anything. Assign them to a symbol/variable, pass them around as arguments to function calls, include them as a dictionary key value, or return them from a function. And of course they can be either named or anonymous/lambda.
=Uniform syntax=
As already mentioned, everything is a statement of the form ID <expressions>. So, how does this work?
- Is the ID a new or non-function existing symbol? Then, the right-hand value will be assigned to it
- Is it a function? Then it will be called, with the right-hand values as arguments
- Do you want to use the result of a function call as part of an expression? Just enclose the function call in
$(...)E.g.:print $(reverse #(1 2 3))
Implementation
The main Arturo interpreter is written in the D language.
License
Arturo is released under the MIT/X11 License.