[Udo]

First: thanks for even trying it out!

Yeah, if you don't leave off the final semicolon, it doesn't return the last value. In that case you would have to use a normal "return" statement. It's definitely a bug, but I left it in there for some time because I thought it was weirdly interesting. I'm going to get rid of that bug though in the next version.

> Second, according to the rules for omitting parentheses

Ah, I'm doing a bad job with the tutorial then. Parentheses don't work like they do in C-like languages. It's more like Lisp in that regard. Your last statement prints "square"="Function" because you're not invoking the function but getting the function pointer. The correct way would be (again, somewhat Lisp-like):

    square = { n |
      n * n
    };
    println (square 5);

Again, this would also be the solution to your last example.

I should probably make a general syntax paragraph as part of the tutorial, especially for people coming from C-likes where invokation goes function(a) instead of (function a).

Edit: there's a section on the site now to explain this, I hope this will make it easier.

[mkdir]

Actually—I think you did explain properly. I must confess that I jumped into the sandbox before reading the documentation, and then I only checked the documentation when ran into behavior I didn't expect.

I do think the semicolon behavior is a bit confusing. The documentation explains that expressions aren't auto-returned if they're followed by a semicolon, but I don't think that quite covers the behavior I pointed out. I might be missing something else from the documentation, though...

Also, I found one more major issue. Your documentation uses the numeric literal "3.1415" in the explanation for named parameters. That really needs to be "3.1416". :P

[Udo]

> I do think the semicolon behavior is a bit confusing.

I agree.

Regarding the named params, the example is:

  f 
    3.1415 
    #name:"I'm using a named param!";

where 3.1415 is an unnamed parameter, and the 3rd line contains the named part. I'm probably showing too many things at once here.

Also, there are definitely a few bugs still to iron out!

[mkdir]

Regarding "3.1415", I was simply passive-aggressively pointing out that if you're referencing pi, you should probably round up to "3.1416". The example itself made sense!

[Udo]

Ah, I'm so dense! Sure, there is also "math.pi" as a built-in for that. (And I fixed this grave rounding error)

I also discovered a scope problem with the recursion example you gave. Turns out, there is (of course) a major bug in there, thanks for discovering that. It's about the visibility of the "factorial" symbol itself, so the workaround is for now:

  factorial = { n |
    factorial = outer.factorial;
    if(n == 0) {
      1
    } {
      n * (factorial (n - 1))
    } 
  };
  println (factorial 5); 

At least, until I restart the service (which I don't want to do while everyone is potentially using the tutorial).