akhamoth/pages/syntax_reference.md

Syntax Reference

In Akhamoth, everything is an expression.

Literals

Identifiers

Identifiers are composed of ASCII letters, digits, and underscores and may not begin with a digit. The preferred naming convention is UpperCamelCase for type names, snake_case for variables, functions, and modules, and SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE for global constants. Identifiers, beginning with an underscore are typically intentionally unused variables and will silence warnings about this from the compiler.

Unicode Identifiers {: .info}

For version 1.0 of Akhamoth, the goal is only to support ASCII identifiers in order to make parsing easier. In the future however, it would be good to look at implementing UAX #31 unicode identifiers.

Atoms

Atoms have the exact same syntax as identifiers, but are prefixed with :, e.g. :akhamoth.

Strings

A String literal consists of " followed by any number of other characters and then another ". Currently there is no support for character escapes of any kind. This will be rectified before version 1.0.

Integers

Integer literals must begin with a digit, followed by any number of digits and underscores. Underscores are intended to be used for grouping digits in long numbers, e.g. 1_000_000_000.

Expressions

Operators

The following is a list of all operators in Akhamoth, ordered from highest precedence to lowest, along with their associativity:

Operator	Associativity
.	left
-	unary
* /	left
+ -	left
|>	left
==	requires parens
..	requires parens
=>	right
->	right
=	right

Function Calls

AST

The design of Akhamoth's AST is essentially the same as Elixir's.