Lexical Rules

Onyx shares many lexical/syntactic elements with Odin, and Jai (unreleased at time of writing). When I first started creating Onyx, I did not know the syntax I wanted so I started with something similar to those languages. After programming with it for a while, I fell in love with the syntax and it stuck. All credit for much of the syntactic consistency goes to Jai, with Odin as secondary inspiration.

Comments

Onyx has two comment types, very similar to another C-like languages. Unlike C, Onyx supports nested multi-line comments, which makes quickly commenting a large block of code easier, as you do not have to worry about a multi-line comment in the commented section.

// A single line comment

/*
	A multi-line comment
*/

/*
	/*
		A nested multi-line comment
	*/
*/

Keywords

A complete list of Onyx's keywords:

package struct    enum        use
if      else      elseif      defer
while   for       do          switch case
break   continue  fallthrough return
sizeof  alignof   typeof      cast
macro   interface where       in     as

There is one deprecated keyword that may be removed in the future.

global

Directives

In order to reduce the number of keywords in the language, Onyx uses directives, which are symbols with a # in front of them. They serve as keywords, without cluttering the list of reserved words. Some examples of directives are:

#load    #load_all   #load_path
#size    #match      #foreign
#library #export     #auto

There are too many directives to list here, and listing them does not help anyone. Most directives appear only in one specific place, and are not valid anywhere else in the code.

Whitespace

Onyx is largely white-space agnostic. White-space is only needed to separate keywords and symbols. Onyx does not care about spaces vs tabs. That being said, most code written in Onyx uses 4 spaces per indentation level.

Semi-colons

Onyx uses semi-colons to delineate between statements; Because Onyx is white-space agnostic, something is needed to separate statements. There is an experimental flag for adding implicit semicolons where appropriate. Simply pass --feature optional-semicolons on the CLI when building or running to apply the rule to all loaded files. Or, added the following as the very first line of any Onyx file to enable optional semicolons within that file.

//+optional-semicolons

Symbols

Symbols in Onyx start with an alphabetic character or an underscore (_), followed by 0 or more alphanumeric characters or underscores. They can be described using the following regular expression:

[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*