Tutorial

The Disclaimer

First -Cinnamon is a toy programming language. I built it as a learning experience into how code gets executed. I wasn't aiming for efficiency, speed or developer-friendliness. So, to set expectations straight, Cinnamon is probably going to be less powerful, slower, and more frustrating than any language you have ever worked with. If you are still interested in trying it out, here's my tutorial, but, I am going to assume you know programming in at least one high-level programming language. If not, this is a horrible first language to learn.

Hello, World (or is it?)

In line with programming tradition, I'll begin by writing for you a simple Hello World program to introduce the basic syntax of Cinnamon. But at this point, we run into the first gotcha of Cinnamon. We cannot print out "Hello, World" because Cinnamon does not yet support strings. For now, integers are the only data type we can work with. So instead, I'll write a program to print out a very popular integer, 42. Here's the program:

    function main() do
      output int 42;
    end

Though small, this example demonstrates a few key features of the language. First, Cinnamon supports functions (and they behave in the same way as functions in other high-level programming languages). Second, the entry point of a program is the main function-which takes no arguments when called. Lastly, to print things out, we write the output <data-type> <value> statement. As a bonus, functions bodies are terminated by the end keyword, and statements in the body (some of them as we will soon learn) are terminated by a semi-colon.

Functions

Like every other programming language, a function in Cinnamon is a block of code that groups multiple, related statements under one identifier. In Cinnamon, all statements are written inside functions. A function is created by writing the function keyword, followed by an identifier that becomes the function's name, parentheses to enclose parameters, the do keyword, the function's body, then lastly, the end keyword. Functions, can, but do not need to, return values. Unlike other languages you might have encountered, a function's parameters are not separated by commas when listing them out.

    function sum_of_squares (a b) do
      return a ^ 2 + b ^ 2;
    end

Data Types

As I have mentioned in the previous sections, there is only one data type available in the language, integer. All literals, inputs, outputs and variables operate exclusively with this data type. Of course, I plan on adding more soon, starting with booleans and chars, then eventually strings, arrays and records. But for now, we are going to have to make do with integers.