Website-only, though there's a Racket implementation under way.
You can find the complete list of special Tabloid keywords on the Tabloid website.
Tabloid has an expression-based grammar, and lacks any distinction between expressions and statements. If there isn't an explicit return from a function, the last expression's value will be returned.
Here are some primitive values in Tabloid: numbers, strings, booleans
100
3.141592
.718
'Hello, World!'
TOTALLY RIGHT
COMPLETELY WRONG
The last two -- TOTALLY RIGHT and COMPLETELY WRONG -- are how we write true and false in Tabloid.
Tabloid supports binary infix operators for arithmetic and logic.
(3 TIMES 5) PLUS (20 DIVIDED BY 7)
(x IS ACTUALLY 3.1415) OR COMPLETELY WRONG
IS ACTUALLY is a way to test equality, like == in most other languages. We can also make comparisons with X BEATS Y (x > y) and X SMALLER THAN Y (x < y).
We can print the result of any expression with YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS. You won't want to miss what you're printing, and now you never will!
YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS 'Hello, World!'
Conversely, we can take (string) input from the user with LATEST NEWS ON. This creates a prompt to ask the user of your incredible program about the latest news.
EXPERTS CLAIM age TO BE
LATEST NEWS ON 'What is your age?'
We define functions with DISCOVER HOW TO functionName WITH arguments, like, this. We can call them with the OF keyword.
DISCOVER HOW TO speak WITH message
RUMOR HAS IT
YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS message
END OF STORY
speak OF 'Hello!'
Lastly, Tabloid has conditional expressions in the form of an if-else, which is written like...
WHAT IF condition
doIfThing
LIES!
doElseThing
We can have multi-line bodies in the doIfThing and doElseThing sections by creating a new scope, delimited by RUMOR HAS IT and END OF STORY. LIES! is optional.
WHAT IF condition RUMOR HAS IT
do
many
things
END OF STORY
In Tabloid, newlines are not significant. If you want, you can squeeze your entire damn program in a single line of source code! How wonderful! I see exactly zero ways that could possibly go wrong.
The entire interpreter is contained in a single file, static/js/lang.js, and pretty straightforward. Due to the, ahem, unusual syntax of Tabloid, there are four layers, which includes a double-pass tokenizer that first produces a stream of word tokens (a string literal is a single word, punctuations are treated separately), and then a second tokenizer that tokenizes multi-word keywords like DISCOVER HOW TO (which is 3 words).
The interpreter uses a tree-walk evaluator on the syntax tree to execute a program.
Last modified 01 November 2022