Erbb Lexical Structure

This document describes what sequence of characters form valid tokens of the language.

Whitespace and Comments

Whitespace allows to separate tokens in the source file.

Comments are treated as whitespace by the transpiler. Single line comments begin with // and continue until a line feed (0x0a) or carriage return (0x0d). Multiline comments begin with /* and end with */. They can’t be nested.

Identifiers

Identifiers begin with an uppercase or lowercase letter A through Z. After the first character, digits or underscore (_) are also allowed.

Identifiers represent tokens of some kind of entity. They are names with implicitly defined semantic:

Either a semantic that the developer will define, such as a data name,
Or a dynamic property of the language, interpreted at configuration time, such as a AudioSample name.

The following are examples of identifiers:

module myGreatModule { ... }
data sample

In the above examples, myGreatModule and sample are identifiers.

Keywords

Unlike identifiers, keywords are predefined list of characters built into the language. In erbb, they can be seen as directives, and each directive can be seen either like a definition of something in the physical world, or a property of that thing in the physical world.

The following are examples of keywords:

module
import
base
define
sources

Symbols

Symbols are predefined list of ponctuation characters built into the language.

The following are examples of symbols:

{ }

Literals

A literal is the source code representation of a value of a type, such as a number or string.

The following are examples of literals:

"some text"
123

Literals in erbb define a type implicitly.

String Literals

A string literal is a sequence of characters surrounded by quotation marks. A string literal is surrounded by double quotation marks and has the following form:

"characters"

String literals do not support any escaping sequence. They are a sequence of ASCII-7 characters of whatever the underlying rendering font can support when converting a stream of character into glyphs.

The following are examples of string literals:

"Hello, world!"
"FREQ"

Path Literals

A path literal is a sequence of characters surrounded by quotation marks. A path literal is surrounded by double quotation marks and has the following form:

"characters"

Path literals do not support any escaping sequence. They are a sequence of ASCII-7 characters.

The following are examples of path literals:

"relative/path/to/my_file.svg"
"../shared/design.svg"