Code by Zed Lopez

You always need whitespace between operators and operands.

Local variable creation

With the kind name and var:

number var x;

Immediate assignment with the kind name and var:

number var x = 5;

But if you're making an assignment, you don't need to specify the kind:

var x = 5;

Well, almost never. With a topic you'd need:

topic var t = "donuts";

because just

var t = "donuts";

would result in t being a text variable.

Assignment with =

let t be a text; let L be a list of numbers; let n be 12;

t = "cat"; L = { 2, 4 }; n = 5;

A ternary operator

i = (j > 1)? j # k;

Comparison with ==, <>,! =

let s be "cat"; if t == s, say "meow"; if L == { 2, 4 }, say "unchanged";

With texts, this is equivalent to if t exactly matches the text s (i.e., *not* if t is s).

You can also test not-equal with your choice of <> or! =. I'm not one to judge.

Attribute accessor

Instead of <property name p> of <object o> you can just use:

o ~> p.

Arithmetic assignment operators:

n += 1; x -= 2; i /= 3; j *= 4;

They don't return a value and can't be used in conditionals.

Increment/decrement operators for numbers in conditionals:

if (n ++) unless (-- i)

They don't work outside of conditionals; use += or -= for imperative phrases.

Bit operators

Not:

l = ~ m;

XOR:

m = n ^ o;

AND:

i = j & k;

OR:

k = l | m;

Shift left:

b = c << 1;

Shift right:

f = g >> 2;

All of the above have assignment variants, too:

b <<= 1; m |= n;

Truthiness and Falsiness

Truth states, numbers, and texts are conditionals unto themselves. With numbers, 0 is considered false; with texts, the empty string is considered false.

Regexp operators

Matches:

t = "banana"; t ~= / "((na)+)" /; n = $1;

The whole matched text is in $0; the first 9 subexpressions are in $1 to $9.

In a conditional, the opening slash must be preceded by ``m``:

if t ~= m/ "xyzzy" /

And substitutions:

t =~ s/ "na" / "X" /; t =~ s/ "na" / "X" /g;