Syntax

Basic language syntax. This may change in the near future!

Brackets

Like most programming languages, brackets are used in Sallied-Forth to define specific language features. These are defined in the base word-list and so could be redefined per application.

The current arrangement specifies that:

Anonymous functions are defined with fn{ and } as the delimiters. So, for instance,

99 fn{ dup + } exec .

would define a function that is then executed and printed out giving the result of '198'.

Arrays are defined using the square brackets [ & ]

[ 97 98 99 100 ]

which will result in a native JAvaScript Array being pushed on the stack.

This is a departure from other Forth based languages and is more in keeping with JavaScript and the like in the definition of sequential collections. As Sallied-Forth is a language to be used with JavaScript it is less confusing if the syntax characters behave similarly.

Objects are defined using the curly brackets { & }

{ a -99 b 27 }

which would produce a JavaScript Object on the stack as if you had defined one in JavaScript using:

var x = { a: -99, b: 27 };

again this syntax was chosen to closely mirror the JavaScript syntax and to provide less resistance in moving from one to the other.