The Agena language

Overview

Agena provides a range of flow control features, such as

if/then/elif/onsuccess/else conditions,
case of/onsuccess/else conditions similar to C's switch/case statements,
if operator to return alternative values,
numerical for/from/to/downto/by loops with optional start, stop, and step values and automatic round-off error correction for iteration variables,
combined numerical for/while loops,
for/in loops over strings and complex data structures,
while, do/as and do/until loops similar to Modula's while and repeat/until not() iterators,
a next statement that immediately proceeds to the next loop iteration,
a break statement to exit a loop early,
a redo statement to restart the current iteration of the loop,
a relaunch statement to reset and restart a loop,
try/catch to handle exceptions.

available are:

rational and complex numbers, with extensions such as infinity and undefined,
strings,
Booleans such as true, false, and fail,
the null value depicting 'nothing',
multi-purpose tables implemented as associative arrays to store any kind of data, taken from Lua,
Cantor sets as collections of unique items,
sequences, i.e. vectors, to store items in strict sequential order,
pairs to hold two values,
registers: fixed-size vectors that can also encapsulate data, with access controlled via a pointer to their top,
user-defined types for sequences, tables, registers, and pairs enabling special-purpose handling,
data type validation with the :: and :- operators and the optional double colon facility in parameter lists,
threads, userdata, and lightuserdata inherited from Lua,
multisets (bags), singly-, unrolled singly- and doubly-linked lists, heaps, bi-directional maps, and dual numbers.

For performance, basic operations on most of these types have been built into the Agena kernel.

with full lexical scoping are supported, as well, and provide the following extensions:

the << (args) -> expression >> syntax to easily define simple functions,
remember tables to store previously computed results, conduct recursion at high speed while maintaining low memory consumption,
user-defined types,
the nargs system variable which holds the number of arguments passed with a call,
metamethods inherited from Lua to define operations for tables, sets, sequences, registers, pairs, and userdata, including OOP-style calls,
self-defined binary operators.

Some other functions are:

graphical capabilities for the Solaris, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows versions,
an arbitrary precision mathematical library,
IPv4 and IPv6 network data transfer,
easy configuration of the personal environment through the Agena initialisation file,
an easy-to-use package system that allows you to load libraries and define short names for all package procedures at once,
enumeration and multiple assignments,
scope control using the scope/epocs keywords,
access to the last iteration value of a loop control variable in the surrounding block,
functions for fast text processing, including the in, replace, lower, and upper operators, the strings and utils packages,
the binio package to easily read and write files in binary mode,
the save and read functions to store any Agena data to a file and read it into a new session,
stack programming,
extended checks on data at function invocation and of the result of a call,
undergraduate Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Statistics packages,
@ and $ for fast mapping and selection,
various bitwise operators,
direct access to the file system and the local network,
dBASE III/IV file support to exchange data with standard applications,
XML, JSON, CSV, INI, gzip, and tar file support,
full international code page support.