mers

Mers is an experimental programming language inspired by high-level and scripting languages, but with error handling inspired by rust.

Why mers?

mers has...

• the type-safety of statically typed languages
  • mers will not crash unless you exit() with a nonzero exit code or write flawed assumptions using the builtin .assume*() functions (Rust's unwrap or expect)
• the flexibility of dynamically typed languages
  • x := if condition() { "my string" } else { 12 } // <- this is valid
• "correctness" (this is subjective and I'll be happy to discuss some of these decisions with people)
  • there is no null / nil
  • all references are explicit: if you pass a list by value, the original list will never be modified in any way.
  • errors are normal values! (no special treatment)
• a flexible type system to easily represent these errors and any complex structure including recursive types:
  • nothing: [] (an empty tuple)
  • a string: string
  • two strings: [string string] (a tuple)
  • many strings: [string ...] (a list)
  • Either a string or nothing (Rust's Option<String>): string/[]
  • Either an int or an error: (Rust's Result<isize, String>): int/string (better: int/Err(string))
• compile-time execution through (explicit) macro syntax: !(mers {<code>}) or !(mers "file")

How mers?

Mers is written in rust. If you have cargo, use the build script in build_scripts/ to produce the executable.

Now, create a new text file (or choose one from the examples) and run it: mers <file>.

Docs

syntax cheat sheet

intro

builtins

statements