Cleet is an object-oriented programming language, with garbage collection. It is designed for writing application programs that are compiled down to machine language (unlike Java or C#, which use an interpreted intermediate code). Eventually, it should also support an interactive environment like Smalltalk or LISP.
Cleet generally uses the popular and concise C-style syntax. Names may contain hyphens, which are both less ugly and more typeable than underscores. The other thing that will stand out when reading Cleet code is that declarations have the name of the variable -- the most important piece of information to someone reading the code -- first, followed by a colon and the type.
Here are some of the principles behind Cleet's design: A computer language ought to be easy to read, and should look good on the screen or on the page. It should be easy for the programmer to use -- including being easy to type, where possible. Extremely common idioms like iterating over a collection should be expressed in a "natural" way, yet the language should be fairly easy for a computer to parse, so that tools such as syntax-directed editors can be built. And it ought to be as conceptually simple as possible (unlike C++!). These are the goals that Cleet tries to balance. It does this by combining a simple object model with a few bits of carefully-chosen syntactic sugar.
Without further explanation:
Class: HelloWorld
Superclass: Program
run()
{
"Hello world!\n".write();
}
Class: LineCountProgram
Superclass: Program
arguments: List of String;
create(arguments: List of String)
{
this.arguments = arguments;
}
run()
{
for (file-name: String in arguments.tail) {
try {
file: File(file-name);
num-lines: Int = 0;
for (line: String in file.contents.lines)
num-lines += 1;
(file-name + ": ").write();
(num-lines.string + " lines.\n").write();
}
catch (error: Exception) {
("Error: " + error.message + "\n").write();
}
}
}
This is an introductory guide. It generally assumes that you already have some knowledge of object-oriented languages, but sometimes it goes ahead and spells things out anyway.