Cap

Cap

Cap was my final year project for my BSc. It's a language that compiles to JavaScript, for use in the browser and node. It takes inspiration from JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Jade, Stylus, Python and ML. The reason I'm open sourcing it is just for show. I wouldn't recommend using it in production, in fact, I'd definitely recommend not using it. Feel free to try it out though, and I'm happy to help out if you get stuck with that.

Intro

Cap is a language built on top of Javascript. It aims to unify the underlying concepts of functional programming with an elegant and succint syntax.

Quickstart

The Cap compiler is implemented in node, get that first (pre-compiled binaries available for Win/Mac, Linux you have to build yourself). Node comes with the package manager npm which you can use to install the Cap compiler.

Then:

npm install cap -g

Provided you used the global flag -g and the path /usr/local/bin is in your path, capc should now be available. Verify by running capc -h which should print something similar to the following:

Usage: capc [options]

Options:

  -h, --help             output usage information
  -V, --version          output the version number
  -t, --printtree        print the syntax tree instead of compiling (forces --print)
  -p, --print            print the output instead of writing to file
  -c, --compress         compress the output
  -e, --targetenv <env>  specify the compilation target (defaults to node)
  -f, --files <a,b..>    compile only the given files (comma separated list)

Examples:

    $ capc

  Recursively scans the current directory and
  and compiles all the `.cap` files it finds

    $ capc -e browser main

  Recursively scans the current directory and
  and compiles all the `.cap` files, bundling
  them into a single file `main.browser.cap.js` with some
  boilerplate code that will make it run in the
  browser. Uses the given file as the program entry point

    $ capc -e node -f example.cap

  Compiles example.cap → example.cap.js for running in node

Syntax

# Assignment
greeting = 'Hello, World!'

# Function calls
console.log greeting

# Literals
myObject = {}
  keyOne = 1
  keyTwo = 2
  keyThree = 3

myArray = []
  'one'
  'two'
  'three'

myFunction = |x|
  # The last expression
  # is implicitely returned
  # from a function
  x + x

I admit this is brief, so feel free to check out the full syntax guide in report at http://bengourley.github.com/Cap/report.pdf.

Editor Syntax

There is a syntax mode for Textmate and SublimeText 2. It is located in editor/Cap.tmLanguage.