Ginger

A scripted lisp language with simple syntax, immutable data structures, concurrency built-in, and minimal time between starting the runtime and actual execution.

Syntax

Ginger is a lisp language, so knowing the syntax is as simple as knowing the data structures.

Strings

Strings are declared two different ways. The standard way, with double quotes:

"this is a string\n <- that was a newline, \t \r \0 \" \\ also work
literal whitespace characters are properly parsed as well
\s is a space"

The second way only works if your string contains exclusively the following characters: a-z A-Z 0-9 _ - ! ? (spaces added for readability)

neat
this_works
so-does-this!
what-about-this?_YUP!

Integers

Integers are defined the standard way, a bunch of numbers with an optional negative. The only interesting thing is that commas inside the number are ignored, so you can make your literals pretty:

0
1
-2
4,000,000

Floats

Pretty much the same as integers, but with a period thrown in there. If there isn't a period, it's not a float:

0.0
-1.5
-1,003.004,333,203

Bytes

Singular unsigned bytes, are also supported. There are two ways to declare them. With a trailing b:

0b
10b
255b

and with a ' followed by a character (or escaped character):

'c
'h
'\n
'\\
''

Vectors

A vector is a sequence of elements wrapped in [ ... ] (no commas):

[ a b 0 1 2
    [embedded also works]
]

Lists

A list is a sequence of elements wrapped in ( ... ) (no commas):

( a b 0 1 2
    [embedded also works]
    (and mixed types)
)

Maps

A map is a sequence of elements wrapped in { ... }. There must be an even number of elements, and there is no delimeter between the keys and values. Keys can be any non-sequence variable, values can be anything at all:

{ a 1
  b 2
  c [1 2 3]
  d (four five six)
  e { 7 seven } }

Comments

A semicolon delimits the beginning of a comment. Anything after the semicolon till the end of the line is discarded by the parser:

;I'm a comment
"I'm a string" ;I'm another comment!