Overview

Overview

Latimer’s syntax is designed to be familiar to users coming from C-style languages like C++ or Java, while removing ambiguity and enforcing clarity through explicit semantics. This page provides a quick overview of the language’s structure and conventions.

File Extension

Latimer scripts are plain text files with a .lat extension. While the compiler does not enforce any extensions on files, it is a good convention to do so! All top-level statements are executed in order, and there’s no required main() entry point.

// hello_world.lat
print("Hello World!");

Statements & Semicolons

Statements are terminated by semicolons (;). Omitting them is not allowed. This allows the start and end of statements to be easily-distinguishable and multiple statements to exist in one line.

print(1); print(2); // Prints 1 and 2, respectively

Comments

Use // for single-line comments.

// This is a single-line comment

Use /* ... */ for multi-line comments.

/* 
This is a multi-line comment.
It spans multiple lines.
*/

print/* this is allowed and prints 1 */(1);

Multi-line comments can appear anywhere whitespace is allowed, including inline—such as between a function name and its argument list.

All comments are ignored during compilation.

Whitespaces

Any form of whitespaces (" ", \t, \r) are ignored by the lexer.

print        (     1); // This works and prints 1

Naming Conventions

Latimer follows a consistent naming convention based on snake_case for most identifiers, including variables, functions, and types.

The exception is struct names, which begin with a capital letter and use CamelCase. This distinction helps visually separate struct types from regular identifiers when reading code at a glance.