# Babble language reference

Types:

* Babble supports the same types as JSON: arrays, objects, strings, numbers, booleans and null.

Literals:

* nil, true, false

Comments:

* introduced by a semicolon at the start of a line
* there can be whitespace before them but nothing else

Strings:

* quote with "..." or '...'
* character escapes: \n, \t, \r, \f, \e
* backslashes and quotes can't be escaped

Special forms:

* variables: get, set, var
* logic: and, or, if, when, cond
* loops: while, dolist, dotimes, do
* functions: function, lambda
* code blocks: do, quote

Functions:

* math functions: +, -, *, /, div, mod, expt, abs, round, floor, min, max, odd?, even?
* comparisons and logic: =, <, >, <=, >=, not, not=
* I/O: print, println, perror, readln
* conversions: parse-integer, parse-float
* data structures: list, dict, append, length, slice, join, item, setitem, keys, member?, push, pop, sort, empty?
* strings: string, split, trim, trim-left, trim-right, starts-with?, ends-with?, upcase, downcase, capitalize
* character class predicates: alphabetic? numeric? whitespace? upper-case? lower-case? 
* type predicates: null? boolean? list? dict? string? number? procedure?
* functional programming: apply, map
* error handling: protect, error
* file I/O: read-file, write-file, append-file
* OS interaction: load, timer, quit
* others: doc, help, parse, eval

Note: readln, timer, perror, load, eval and quit are only defined in stand-alone mode.