Nutmeg in a Nutshell

»»» Work in Progress «««

Nutmeg is a teaching-oriented imperative programming language that aims to provide seamless integration of the individual features of functional programming. This includes the ability to write higher-order functions, as do most modern programming languages. However, Nutmeg goes further and supports abilities such as:

• Declaring functions side-effect free and/or to only work on immutable values.
• Both mutable and immutable versions for all built-in classes.
• Copy-on-write updating of objects.
• Deferring individual expressions to be evaluated lazily and/or declaring function bodies to use lazy evaluation throughout.
• ‘Locking' values against change temporarily or permanently.

Temporary list of contents

While we are still developing Nutmeg, this guide is very far from complete. However, here are a few in-progress documents you may find useful.

• Tokenisation Rules as EBNF Grammar and as a railroad diagram.
• Nutmeg Syntax as EBNF Grammar and as a railroad diagram.
• Assignments - a page on assignment in Nutmeg.
• Comments - a page on comments in Nutmeg.
• Compiling and Running Programs - a page on how to use the nutmeg and nutmegc commands.
• For syntax - a page on of for loops i Nutmeg.
• If Syntax - a page on the if conditional in Nutmeg.
• Ranges - a page on ranges in Nutmeg.
• Statements - a page on the syntax of statements.
• Unit tests - a page on the built-in unit-test framework.
• Variables - a page on the different kinds of variables.