scope-planeter / agora

a dynamically typed, garbage collected, embeddable programming language built with Go

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.
• import is 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 like Println.
• 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
  • Closed issues: https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/agora/issues?milestone=2&page=1&state=closed
  • Wiki: https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/agora/wiki#v02
  • Blog post: http://0value.com/agora-v0-2--closures--coroutines-and-for--range

v0.1.0 / 2013-09-17

• Initial release
  • Closed issues: https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/agora/issues?milestone=1&state=closed
  • Wiki: https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/agora/wiki#v01
  • Blog post: http://0value.com/introducing-agora--a-dynamic--embeddable-programming-language-built-with-Go

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.