Freya: lexical structure

The lexical syntax of Freya has no big surprises. Freya is a Unicode, case insensitive, but accent insensitive, language. Whitespace is ignored except in its role of separating significative lexemes. Line feeds are considered as whitespace, and there are no nasty tricks involving the indentation.

Identifiers

Freya identifiers always begin with a letter character or an underscore, followed by a sequence of arbitrary length containing letters, decimal digits and underscores. Identifiers are case insensitive, but not accent insensitive. For instance, bitSet and BitSET represents the same identifier, but deja and déjà are different identifiers.

Note
In any case, it's not a good idea declaring identifiers with an extended character set, at least, if you're not writing a small monolithic application. Otherwise, you should consider your code may be used by programmers with a keyboard unable to generate those special characters.

Keywords

The following identifiers have special meanings, and they are considered as reserved words:

abstract	and	as	begin	case
class	const	constructor	destructor	div
do	downto	else	end	ensures
event	except	extern	false	fault
finally	for	goto	if	implementation
in	interface	internal	invariant	is
iterator	lock	loop	method	mod
namespace	new	nil	not	of
old	on	operator	or	out
override	partial	private	property	protected
public	raise	readonly	record	repeat
required	sealed	shl	shr	static
then	to	true	try	until
using	var	virtual	while	xor
yield

However, you still use these keywords as regular identifiers by adding an at character (@) as a prefix:

// Partial is a keyword, but is used here
// as a regular identifier.
method ProcessClass(@partial: Boolean);
begin
    if @partial then
        // ...
end;

Keywords are case insensitive: BEGIN and begin represents the same keyword.

Comments

Freya allows two kinds of comments:

Line comments: they start with two consecutive slashes (//) and they end with the end of the line.
Multiline comments: they are enclosed between curly braces, and they can extend across several lines.

Multiline comments cannot be nested.

Lexical structure

Identifiers

Keywords

Comments

See also