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Category:Sparkling: Difference between revisions
→Syntax and semantics
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function printMessage(msg) {
var numCharsWritten = printf("%s\n", msg);
stdout.printf("%d characters written\n", numCharsWritten);
}
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* Number ("number"): either a signed integer (C's <tt>long</tt> type) or a double-precision floating-point number. The only type of implicit conversion in the language is between integers and floating-point numbers (if an arithmetic operator has an integer and a floating-point operand, it will treat both values as floating-point and it will produce a floating-point result as well.)
* String ("string"): a sequence of bytes, which is not necessarily a human-readable string (it can contain arbitrary binary data). When exposed through the C API, a terminating 0 byte is always appended to the end of string. It does not count against the length of the string object, but it makes standard C functions to operate on Sparkling strings easily.
* Array ("array"): Simple integer-indexed array. Arrays are mutable. Arrays are bounds-checked (an out-of-bounds access causes a runtime error).
* Hash tables ("hashmap"): Mutable associative container. The type of its keys and values can be of any type, but indexing by <tt>nil</tt> or by the floating-point <tt>NaN</tt> value is not permitted.
* Function ("function"): in Sparkling, functions are first-class values. They can be passed to functions as arguments and returned by functions. There is a literal syntax for creating - possibly unnamed - function objects. Sparkling has lexical closures, so functions capture variables (by value) from outer scopes. All functions are variadic; it is not an error to call a function with more or less arguments than the number of arguments it is defined with.
* User information objects ("userinfo"): in order to facilitate the creation of third-party extension libraries, Sparkling has a "joker" data type, the user info. User info objects have two subtypes: weak and strong. Weak user info values hold an arbitrary, unmanaged, generic C pointer (<tt>void *</tt>), while strong user info objects contain a managed, reference-counted Sparkling object of an user-defined "class". (The Sparkling API makes it possible for users to define their own classes -- memory-intensive built-in objects like strings and arrays already use this mechanism for managing memory.)
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