An interpreted programming language written in Go.
Nitrogen literals include integers, floats, booleans, strings, nil, arrays, hash maps (also known as dictionaries or associative arrays), and functions.
Nitrogen’s null value is nil. nil is used to denote the absence of a value.
It’s returned from a out of range array or map index among other situations.
Nitrogen makes a distinction between an integer an a floating point number. The two are not comparable to each other without explicit conversion.
Integers are implemented as signed 64-bit numbers giving them a minimum value of −9,223,372,036,854,775,808 and a maximum of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. Integers can be declared using decimal, octal, or hexadecimal notation. Here’s a few examples:
45 // Decimal
0o664 // Octal, leading 0
0xA4 // Hexadecimal, prefixed with 0x
0b1010 // Binary, prefixed with 0b
Integers support all the standard arithmetic and bitwise operators and are
comparable. Integers may contain underscores “_” to separate digits:
10_000_000. Rules around using the digit separator are very loose. They may
appear anywhere in the number with not limitation on how many are used
consecutively. Obviously, one should be mindful and consistent when using them.
Floating point numbers are implemented as 64-bit IEEE floating point numbers. Floats can only be represented in dotted decimal notation. Exponential notation is coming soon. Like ints, floats support the standard arithmetic operations and are comparable. Floats may contain digit separators as well.
Booleans are true and false. Nitrogen has no such thing as “falsy” or
“truthy” values. Only the literals true and false evaluate as a boolean
value.
Strings are made up of a collection of UTF-8 code points. There are two types of strings in Nitrogen, interpreted strings and raw strings.
Interpreted strings are surrounded by double quotes and cannot contain any new lines (it can’t span lines), but it can contain escape sequences:
If any other escape sequence is found, the backslash and following character are
left untouched. For example the string "He\llo World" would not change in its
interpreted form since the escape sequence \l isn’t valid. It’s always good
practice to explicitly escape a backslash rather than relying on this behavior.
Raw strings are slightly different. They’re surrounded by single quotes and may
span multiple lines. The only valid escape sequence is \', escaping a single
quote. Raw strings can be helpful for templates or large bodies of inline text.
Strings may be indexed like an array using square brackets "Hello, world"[0] ==
"H". The value of an index expression is another string with the character at
the index of the original string.
Byte strings are similar to normal strings except they are not stored as UTF-8 code points. Byte strings allow for manipulation of individual bytes. Byte strings and normal strings can be converted between each other, but some conversion loss may happen due to UTF-8 conversion. Byte strings and normal strings are not comparable as they are separate types. One side of the comparison must be converted to the other type. Converting a String to a Byte String is preferred. All escape sequences are valid in byte strings.
Byte strings can be creating using the “b” prefix before a string:
b"I'm a byte string"
Bytes can be concatenated, compared, and indexed like normal strings.
Functions are literals just like anything else but they have their own docs here.