Jason Basic

High quality programming language to implement the most important programs in.

There are some examples in the Examples folder you can check out.

Syntax

Comments

Comments can be done with #, //, REM, or %, depending on your preference. Comments must be on their own line.

# Hello
// We are the comments
REM to do something important
% do you like matlab comments??

Variable Assign

Variables follow the conventions of most other languages. Alphanumeric, with _ allowed. Cannot start with a number.

a = 5
thingyThing = 10

Arrays can be instantiated with DIM

DIM a 5
# This will print the array. It is initialised with 0s.
PRINT a
# Output will be 0,0,0,0,0

No shorthand operators like +=, -=, etc.

You can access from arrays with () Arrays are indexed from 0.

DIM a 6
a(5) = 100
PRINT a(5)

Control Flow

IF/ELSE statements

IF expression
END IF

IF expression
ELSE
END IF

WHILE loop

WHILE expression
END WHILE

FOR each loop Allows you to iterate over the elements of an array or the characters of a string. In the future I plan to let you use an expression after IN instead of requiring a variable.

FOR iterator IN iterableVariable
END FOR

Labels and GOTO. Labels must follow the same naming standards as variables.

Place:
PRINT "Hi"
GOTO Place
# This will create an infinite loop!

Dynamic GOTO GOTO (expression)

If a single variable is provided, it is assumed to be a label. If more tokens are provided, Jason Basic will assume it is an expression that resolves in a label name. For readability, it is recommended to surround the expression in () when this is intended.

Place:
target = "Place"
PRINT target
GOTO (target)
# this will create an infinite loop!

END. This terminates the whole program.

END

Expressions

Most things exist.

Arithmetic: +, -, *, /, %, ** Brackets: ( ) Boolean: ! & | ^ Comparison: < > <= >= =

Yep that's right folks. Single equals for both assign and compare.

Builtins

There are some built in operations you can use.

Builtins that require a variable name to store can take items in arrays (e.g. a(0)). This is useful for things such as generating a random number in an array.

I/O

PRINT (expression)

INPUT (expression) TO (variable name)

This just works as print in non-interactive modes (dj/msg in the discord bot). It will let you capture user input in interactive (dj/basic in the discord bot).

Data Generation

RANDOM (variable name)

Generate random number from 0 to 1. Literally Math.random() from javascript.

Data Manipulation

UPPERCASE (variable name)

Convert variable to uppercase. Also implicitly converts to string, so can be used to convert number to string.

LOWERCASE (variable name)

Convert variable to lowercase. Also implicitly converts to string, so can be used to convert number to string.

ROUND (variable name)

Round the number in the given variable.

TONUMBER (variable name)

Convert the variable to a number. The current implementation follows javascript rules, but may get more strict in future releases. Please treat non-numeric values as undefined behaviour and handle your input carefully.

SIN (variable name)

Take the sine of the variable and store it in the variable. Other mathematical functions available: COS, TAN, ASIN, ACOS, ATAN, SINH, COSH, SQRT

Preprocessor Macros

This section is a stub. Please help Jason Basic by expanding it! DEFINE EXPAND

Breakpoints

Put * at the end of a line to make it print the values of every variable before every time it runs that line.

valoeghese / Jason-Basic

readme