Syntax Overview

Cranberry is very similar and inspired by a bunch of languages including Rust, C#, Kotlin, Swift, Python, JS, etc. It also offers a lot of shorthands to make your code written faster.

Feel free to come back here since you don’t need to memory everything.

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Semicolons

Cranberry discourages the use of semicolons. However you can add them for multiple inline statements or just for clarity and familiarity.

Comments

Single line comments can be created using the hashtag (#).

# This is a comment
println("Hello World")  # These get ignored

Shorthand Assignments

Cranberry allows you to use shorthand assignment operators. These include

• +=, -= : Add/Subtract and assign operator
• *=, /= : Multiply/Divide and assign operator
• %=, ^= : Modulo/Power and assign operator
• ++ : Increment operator
• -- : Decrement operator

Each assignment and shorthand assignment also returns the new value.

Coalescing Operator

The ?? operator allows you to return a second value if the first one is falsey (false, nil, 0, etc.)

let x = 15
let y = x ?? 30

print(y) # prints 15

let x = nil
let y = x ?? 30

print(y) # prints 30

Type Casting

Converting a value from one type to another can be done using the builtin type casting functions.

let my_string = "12.5"
let my_number = number(my_string)

This works with string, number, bool, list, and dict so far.

Formatted Strings

Formatted strings (f-strings) allow you to execute code inside a string and use that as a way of formatting your values directly.

Use the dollar sign ($) operator before a string to make it formatted. Then use braces inside the string for an expression.

let x = 10

println($"value of x is {x}")
# prints `value of x is 10`

Optionally you can use the format() function which takes a string and replaces the {} braces with the argument in order.

let name = "John"
let greeting = format("Hello, {}", name)

print(greeting) # prints `Hello, John`

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Conventions

Cranberry has a few syntax conventions that you can adhere to. These are not mandatory but can function as a style guide.

1. Cranberry uses PascalCase for classes and namespaces.
2. Functions, variable names, etc. use snake_case.
3. Using directives for namespaces must always go at the top of the file.
4. Classes using object creation should use self as the name for the first parameter of object methods.
5. Try leaving extra lines and using indents to improve code clarity.
6. Use tabs instead of spaces unless they improve code clarity. (Most IDEs let you change tab sizes anyways.)
7. Don’t use semicolons, you probably will never use them anyway.

Syntax Example

using Std::IO;
namespace Hello;

class FooBar {
    constructor(self) => self.num = 5

    fn my_function(self) {
        # This is a comment
        self.num = 10
    }
}

let my_variable = 10
println($"var is {my_variable}")