This guide is oriented mostly towards those coming from backgrounds primarily in scripting languages. I am personally heavily biased in Python rather than Lua or Ruby and this bias is obvious throughout.
It is organized as a series of levels of increasing complexity and difficuty. We start with the basics on about the same level of power as a language like Python and move onto more advanced language topics. I do not think it likely that you would feel that you would have a complete Python-like language after the first chapter since many of the more advanced structures in like classes are closer to C/C++ and so is deferred to those levels. Furthermore, the main incentive to use scopes lies not in simply building a better “blub” language and reinventing the Python/Lua/Ruby, C/C++/Rust, or Lisp/Scheme wheels, but in taking the core ideas of these languages and adding new and exciting features which are mostly novel, to my knowledge.
This is a work in progress as I myself learn the language. Currently Level 1 is mostly complete and quite thorough. The higher levels are much less so although the documents do contain some small snippets I have collected and may be of use until this guide becomes more polished.
Lastly there are a few typographical problems due to the use of org-mode. If you see some text wrapped in ‘~’ symbols that should be a code snippet. This might be fixed if I move to using a different format, but for now being able to execute code in org-mode source blocks results in higher quality content. So while there is an HTML rendered version in Github, I recommend reading it in an editor that understands org mode like Emacs.
That said feel free to contribute.
- Level 0
- Basics of the syntax format (Scopes List Notation (SLN)) and how best to execute Scopes code.
- Level 1
- Should bring you up to speed with the language basics and a fairly close equivalence to a scripting language like Python. The compilation/execution model is not clear at this point.
- Level 2
- Scopes features roughly equivalent with core C/C++ or Rust. Includes topics like arrays, constant vs. dynamic values, heap allocated data structures, type checking, and interfacing with C code.
- Level 3
- What it means for Scopes as a “Scheme-like” language beyond just the syntax. The main focus here is functional programming and some of the basic metaprogramming features.
- Level 4
- Novel Scopes features. Includes advanced metaprogramming,
multi-stage programming, dynamic compilation, and achieving AOT
compilation. Also covers the Scopes runtime API
scopesrtand the borrow checker.
- Homepage
- http://scopes.rocks
- Project Repository
- https://hg.sr.ht/~duangle/scopes
- Documentation
- https://scopes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Check out the scopes-lang topic on Github.
Some other interesting projects include:
- Tukan Media Library & Visual Game Engine
- https://hg.sr.ht/~duangle/tukan