Arturo

'''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.

Todo

Reports:Tasks_not_implemented_in_Arturo