Finch: Expressions
Expressions are the heart of any programming language—they're the building blocks for programs. Finch, like many functional languages but unlike most C-derived languages, does not have statements, only expressions. We'll go over the different kinds of expressions Finch supports, starting from the bottom up.
Comments
OK, technically comments aren't expressions, but here is as good a place as any to describe them. Line comments start with // and end at the end of the line:
// this is a comment
Block comments start with /* and end with */. They can span multiple lines or be within a single one. Unlike C and others, block comments can nest in Finch:
/* this is /* a nested */ comment */
Literals
Finch currently supports two atomic types: numbers and strings. Numbers are double-precision floating point values, and strings are text. Finch doesn't support a lot of fancy formats for them yet, just the basic:
0 1234 -432.1 "a string" "another string" "supported escapes: \" \n \\"
Finch also has a couple of special standard objects. The object nil is used to indicate the absence of a value. true and false are boolean values that you can use with things like if:then: and while:do:. Unlike numbers and strings, these aren't built into the language. They are just regular objects implemented in Finch code that happen to do useful things.
Variables
Variable names in Finch are more flexible than in most other languages. They must contain a letter or an underscore somewhere in the name, but pretty much everything else is fair game. All of these are valid variable names:
foo Bar best-friends4eva _under_score_ I<3punctuation!!!!!1
Finch has two kinds of variables. Normal variables are lexically scoped like
other languages. Variables that start with an underscore (_) are fields.
These are looked up on the object that the current method is being called on.
In other words, when you see _name, it's a bit like this.name in other
languages.
Messages
What other languages refer to as "calling a function" or "invoking a method", Finch calls "sending a message." Sending a message to an object (and remember, everything is an object) invokes a method on that object. There are three flavors of message sends in Finch: unary, operator, and keyword.
Unary Messages
An unary message has a name but no arguments. You can send an unary message to an object by following the object with the name of the message:
// send the 'length' message to the string "hi there" "hi there" length
Operators
A series of one or more punctuation characters is an operator. You can define whatever operators you like, but don't go too crazy. The goal here is not to make your code look like comic strip profanity:
// valid punctuation characters + - ! $ % ^ & * = < > / ? ~ // can also be combined -- ?! ---@ <=/=> @*#%&#$@&!
All operators are infix—they have operands on both sides. Using an operator sends a message to the left-hand operand with the right-hand one as an argument.
a + b
The above expression means "send a + message to a, passing in b as an argument." Finch doesn't have any built-in operators: they're all just message sends.
Because of this, all operators have the same precedence and associativity (left to right). This is unlike most other languages with hard-coded precedence levels. Parentheses are your friends here.
1 + 2 * 3 // evaluates to 9 in Finch 1 + (2 * 3) // evaluates to 7
Because there are no built-in operators, there are no unary operators in Finch. Instead, it uses a unary message for what would be an unary operator in another language:
// Finch C/JS/etc. value neg // -value condition not // !condition
Keyword Messages
We've covered messages that take zero arguments (unary) and one (operators). To pass more than one argument, you use keyword messages. A single keyword is a name terminated by a colon (:), or just a colon by itself. A keyword message is formed by alternating keywords and arguments. An example will help here:
dictionary add-key: "some key" value: "the value"
This sends the add-key:value: message to the dictionary object, passing in "some key" and "the value" as arguments. You can chain as many keywords as you want in a single message (within reason):
chef cook-soup: tomato appetizer: calimari entree: veal dessert: cake
That sends a single cook-soup:appetizer:entree:dessert: message to chef with four arguments.
Like other messages, keyword messages usually follow a receiver (dictionary and chef in the above examples). However, you can also omit the receiver. In that case, it will implicitly be sent to a special Ether object:
// this: write: "hi" // is equivalent to: Ether write: "hi"
Most of Finch's control flow operations like if:then: and while:do are defined as methods on Ether.
Sequences
Multiple expressions can be sequenced together into a single expression by separating them with commas.
write: "hi", write: "bye"
This code forms a single expression that writes "hi" and then "bye". When executed, a sequence evaluates each of its expressions in order, and then returns the result of the last one.
To make things a little cleaner, Finch also treats newlines as commas in places where that makes sense. In other words, we could write the above just as:
write: "hi" write: "bye"
This doesn't mean all newlines will be treated as commas. If the end of a line is obviously not the end of an expression, a newline will be ignored. For example:
write: 1 + 2 // prints 3
Since a + can't end an expression, the newline after is ignored and it continues onto the next line.
Cascades
Sometimes you want to send a series of messages to the same object. To avoid making you repeat the receiver over and over, you can cascade messages by separating them with semicolons (;). Instead of doing:
file write: "A line" file << "Another line" file write: "A third" file close
You can instead do:
file write: "A line" ; << "Another line" ; write: "A third" ; close
This style is emulated in other languages using fluent interfaces. In Finch, any object can be cascaded.
Blocks
Finch looks like a lot of other languages in that curly braces define local blocks:
{ write: "inside a block" }
However, these blocks aren't what you think they are. When you enclose an expression in curly braces, you're actually creating a block object. A block object is essentially a closure or a local function. It's an object that contains a chunk of code and a lexical scope (i.e. its own set of local variables).
When you create a block, the code inside it isn't immediately executed. It's just packaged up into the block object. The above example won't actually print anything. To invoke the code inside a block, you send the block object a call message:
{ write: "inside a block" } call
Now "inside a block" will be printed.
Blocks are Objects
It's important to realize that blocks really are just objects. They can be stored in variables, passed to methods, etc. In fact, Finch doesn't have any built-in flow control structures. Consider:
if: a < b then: { write: "less" } else: { write: "greater" }
That looks like some built-in if/then construct. It isn't. What you're looking at is an if:then:else: keyword message being sent to Ether. The two blocks are arguments that are sent with the message. The implementation of that method looks at the first condition argument, and decides which of the two blocks to call based on that.
Block Arguments
Because blocks are basically functions, you can also pass arguments to them. If a block has arguments, they appear after the opening curly brace, surrounded by pipes (|):
{|a b| a + b }
The above code creates a block that takes two arguments. When called, it returns the sum of the arguments. You pass arguments to a block by using one of the keyword versions of call. For example:
{|a| write: a } call: "arg" // one argument {|a b| write: a + b } call: "one" : "two" // two args {|a b c| write: a + b + c } call: "one" : "two" : "three" // three
If you pass too many arguments to a block, the extra ones will be ignored. If you don't pass enough, it will assign the special value nil to the missing ones.
Assignment
Variables are declared and given values using assignment expressions. An assignment expression is simply a name followed by an assignment arrow, followed by some expression for the value to assign to the variable. For example:
a <- "some value"
Variables do not have to be explicitly declared—assigning it a value will create it if it doesn't already exist. The value returned by an assignment expression is the assigned value. For example:
write: (a <- "hi")
This creates a variable a, assigns "hi" to it, then prints "hi".
Short and Long Assignment
There are actually two kinds of assignment in Finch: short and long. The <- operator is short assignment and is what you'll use most of the time. It assigns to a variable in the current scope. If you want to avoid creating a new variable in the current scope and instead assign to an existing variable defined in an outer scope, you use the long assignment arrow: <--.
An example will clarify:
a <- "outside" do: { a <- "inside" } write: a
This chunk of code will display "outside". The assignment inside the do: block creates a new a variable local to that block. When the block ends, that a is discarded and the outer one remains. Let's change it to use long assignment:
a <- "outside" do: { a <-- "inside" } write: a
Now this code will print "inside". The a <-- "inside" line now means "walk up the scope chain looking for an existing variable named a and assign to it." (If it fails to find a previously declared variable to assign to, it just does nothing.)
One way you can think of this is that short assignment always means "declare a new variable in the current scope" and long assignment means "assign to an existing one."
Arrays
Finch has built-in support for resizable arrays. Most of the things you can do with arrays use normal message syntax, but there's also a little special sauce for creating arrays. A hash (#) followed a series of expressions in square brackets creates an array with an element for the value of each expression. Elements are separated with commas (or newlines) like a normal sequence. Enough talk:
#[] // creates an empty array #[1, 2, 3] // a three-element array #[123, "text"] // arrays can have elements of different types #[1 + 2, 3 neg] // expressions are fine too // newlines can separate elements too #["first" "second" "third"]
Arrays are objects like everything else, so they can be stored in variables, passed to methods, etc.
Precedence and Associativity
OK, so we've got the building blocks. Now let's talk about how they interact. The two keys parts are precedence and associativity. Precedence determines which expressions bind "tighter" when different expression types are mixed together. From lowest (loosest) to highest, we have: binds, sequences, assignment, keyword messages, operators, then unary messages. For example, given an expression like this:
a <- 8 + 2 neg mod: 4 - 2 write: a
Finch will parse that like this:
((a <- ((8 + (2 neg)) mod: (4 - 2))), (write: a))
Associativity controls how a series of the same type of expression is interpreted. Unary and operator messages associate to the left. A series of keywords will be parsed into a single keyword. Assignment is right-associative. Or, by example:
3 neg abs square // is parsed as (((3 neg) abs) square) 1 + 2 * 3 - 4 // is parsed as (((1 + 2) * 3) - 4) dict addKey: 123 value: "v" // is parsed as a single "addKey:value:" message a <- b <- c <- 4 // is parsed as (a <- (b <- (c <- 4)))
That's pretty much the entirety of Finch's syntax. It's different, but I think it's a good bit simpler than most languages out there. (I'm looking at you C++.)