Values are the built-in atomic object types that all other objects are composed of. They can be created through literals, expressions that evaluate to a value. All values are immutable — once created, they do not change. The number 3 is always the number 3. The string "frozen" can never have its character array modified in place.
Booleans
A boolean value represents truth or falsehood. There are two boolean literals, true and false.
Numbers
Like other scripting languages, Teascript has a single numeric type: double-precision floating point. Number literals look like you expect coming from other languages:
0
1234
-5678
3.14159
1.0
-12.34
0.0314159e02
0.0314159e+02
314.159e-02
0xcaffe2
0b100010
0o457Strings
A string is an array of bytes. Typically, they store characters encoded in UTF-8, but you can put any byte values in there, even zero or invalid UTF-8 sequences. (You might have some trouble printing the latter to your terminal, though.) Strings can be created with single quotes (’), double quotes ("), or backticks (```).
Escaping
A handful of escape characters are supported:
"\0" // The NUL byte: 0
"\"" // A double quote character
"\\" // A backslash
"\$" // A dollar sign
"\a" // Alarm beep
"\b" // Backspace
"\e" // ESC character
"\f" // Formfeed
"\n" // Newline
"\r" // Carriage return
"\t" // Tab
"\v" // Vertical tab
"\x48" // Unencoded byte (2 hex digits)
"\u0041" // Unicode code point (4 hex digits)
"\U0001F64A" // Unicode code point (8 hex digits)
"\123" // Decimal byte value (3 decimal digits)
A \x followed by two hex digits specifies a single unencoded byte:
print("\x48\x69\x2e") // Hi.
A \u followed by four hex digits can be used to specify a Unicode code point:
print("\u0041\u0b83\u00DE") // AஃÞ
A capital \U followed by eight hex digits allows Unicode code points outside of the basic multilingual plane, like all-important emoji:
print("\U0001F64A\U0001F680") // 🙊🚀
A \ followed by three decimal digits specifies a single byte value:
print("\84\101\97") // SAL
Interpolation
String literals also allow interpolation. If you have a dollar sign ($) followed by an expression inside square brackets, the expression is evaluated.
print("Math ${3 + 4 * 5} is fun!") // Math 23 is fun!
Arbitrarily complex expressions are allowed inside the brackets:
print("wow ${[1, 2, 3].map(n => n * n).join()}") // wow 149
An interpolated expression can even contain a string literal which in turn has its own nested interpolations, but doing that gets unreadable pretty quickly.
Multiline strings
Teascript supports multiline strings using triple quotes, which can be single, double, or backticks:
'''This is a
multiline string
with single quotes.'''
"""This is a
multiline string
with double quotes."""
```This is a
multiline string
with backticks.```Nil
Teascript has a special value nil. It functions a bit like void in some languages: it indicates the absence of a value. If you call a function or method that doesn’t return anything and get its returned value, you get nil back.