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Hello world

Welcome to the baba-lang tutorial (and reference)! baba-lang is a language made by me for the purpose of learning how programming languages work, from parsing to static analysis to interpretation. To start with, lets make a Hello World program in baba-lang.

Make sure that you have baba-lang in your local machine

See How to install and use baba-lang for how to do so.

Create the first baba-lang program

1. Make a directory inside the baba-lang project directory for your scripts to reside in. Name it whatever you like.

   mkdir my-bl-scripts
   

2. Activate your virtual environment, if you have a venv and haven’t activated already.

   source "<your venv root>/bin/activate"
   

3. Create a file in your script directory. Let’s call it hello-world.bl. baba-lang source code uses the extension .bl

4. Write this to the file using your favorite editor and save it.

    # my first baba-lang program!
   
    print('Hello, world!');
   

5. Run the baba-lang interpreter

   python3 src/main.py my-bl-scripts/hello-world.bl
   

If you see “Hello, world!” printed to the console, then you have successfully ran your first baba-lang program!

Explanation

You can see that:

• The print function takes a string input and prints it to the console. The syntax for calling functions in baba-lang is like that of typical imperative languages
• Strings are either single-quoted or double-quoted. This would be fine:

  print("Hello, world!");
  

  Unlike Perl, there is no difference between single-quoting and double-quoting.

• A semicolon is used to end a statement in baba-lang. It is required.

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