The agora programming language
Agora is a dynamically typed, garbage collected, embeddable programming language. It is built with the Go programming language, and is meant to provide a syntactically similar, loose and dynamic companion to the statically typed, machine compiled Go language - somewhat like Lua is to C.
Installation
go get -t github.com/PuerkitoBio/agora/...
This will install the agora packages as well as the agora command-line tool. See agora -h for help, provided the $GOPATH/bin path is in your exported path. The -t flag installs the test dependencies, it works only on Go 1.2 and later, omit it otherwise.
Example
Much more examples are available in the wiki and the source code under /testdata/src, but to give a taste of the syntax, here is the mandatory hello world:
// Output: Hello, Agora !
fmt := import("fmt")
func greet(name) {
fmt.Println("Hello,", name, "!")
}
greet("Agora")
A few things to note:
- It looks very similar to Go, minus the types.
importis a built-in function, not a keyword. This is important with dynamically-loaded modules, it gives you control of where this overhead of loading and compiling the code is done. It returns the value exported by the module - in this case, an object that exposes methods likePrintln.- Obviously, since this is a dynamically-typed language, arguments have no types.
:=introduces a new variable. Using an undefined variable is an error, so this statement could not have been=.- Statements are valid in the top-level (module) scope. That's because a module (the name for an agora file) is an implicit (top-level) function.
- Semicolons are managed just like in Go, so although they are inserted in the scanning stage, they are optional (and usually omitted) in the source code.
Resources
- Getting started: https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/agora/wiki/Getting-started
- Documentation's index in the wiki: https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/agora/wiki
- Source code documentation on GoDoc: http://godoc.org/github.com/PuerkitoBio/agora
Changelog
v0.2.0 / 2013-10-08
- Coroutines, closures, for..range
v0.1.0 / 2013-09-17
- Initial release
License
Agora is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License, the same as the Go programming language. The full text of the license is available in the LICENSE file at the root of the repository.