What is CaffeineC

CaffeineC is a programming language that I made for some reason. Nobody asked for it, and it’s not better than other languages (except for python, I don’t like python). Should you still use it? No, probably not. At least, not yet. CaffeineC is in it’s early stages of development, it doesn’t have many features, and I still have no clue what I’m doing.

What can it do

The short answer is not much. The longer one is that the current version can’t do much. It is very limited in terms of working with other files or libraries, and doesn’t have many built-in ones for that matter. You can basically print stuff to the console and that is it. A newer version is being worked on, but it is not yet very stable.

Some basics

Defining variables

So as in any good programming language, you can define variables. It is pretty easy in CaffeineC, not as easy as in python maybe, but still pretty easy. It involves the var keyword, followed by a variable name, the variable type, an optional assignment, and a semicolon at the end.

It should look something like this:

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var a: int = 10;

Using expressions

Most of the CaffeineC programming language syntax is made up of expressions. Any mathematical operation is an expression. Comparisons are expressions. Function calls are expressions. In any expresssion there is a left side and a optional right side. Each side can have a constant, variable, function call or some other stuff. So as a basic example, we will just do some basic addition:

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a = a + 2

This example should add 2 to a and then save the value to a

Defining functions

Another useful feature is the ability to define functions. Smaller (or bigger) blocks of code, that you need to run multiple times, and you don’t want to just copy and paste. Again, CaffeineC uses a keyword to prefix the function definition, in this case func. The only required parts for a function is the keyword and a name for the function. But arguments and a return type may also be specified.

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func add(x: int, y:int):int {
  return x + y
}

This is a very simple function for adding two numbers together. It is not really necessary, but it is an easy way to show how functions work.

Built-in functions

To make the programming language somewhat usable, it includes two builtin functions: print and sleep.

The print function takes one argument, which can be a string or a number. This input gets formatted and a newline character gets added to the end.

The sleep function also only takes one argument, this time it’s the time in nanoseconds that the program should sleep for. You can either directly write the number of nanoseconds, but that can be lengthy, so I added a duration type. This type consists of a number and a suffix. This suffix can be one of: ns, us, ms, s, m, or h. The compiler automatically converts this synta to a number in nanoseconds.

Example program

With the information above, we can construct a simple program:

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var a:int = 5;
var b:int = 10;

func add(x: int, y:int):int {
  return x + y
}

print add(a, b);

This program is very simple, but it demonstrates how the programming language works. If you have used any normal programming language before, you should (hopefully) be able to figure out what this program does. If not, idk, learn some other programming language first.

Anyway, save this as example.caffc

Installing the compiler

The easiest way to install the compiler, is to go to the releases page and download either the .exe file if you are on windows, or the other file if you are on linux. The copy the executable file into the same directory where your example.caffc file is, and run:

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./CaffeineC build demo.caffc

or if you are on windows:

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./CaffeineC.exe build demo.caffc

You should now have a file named output or output.exe in the same directory, it you run it, it should print 15 in the command line.