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Labels

Labels are anything that is named. All named things in Rhumb are elements provided by the programmer or through libraries. Rhumb, the language, only has a two words that are reserved from being labels (but they are reserved across all human languages):

  • yes; oui; ja; da; nai; vâng
  • no; non; nein; ne; ochi; không

Only one set will be active in a given project at the source level. IDE plugins will provide translation of this and other labels via a builtin service and supporting translation file format.

Label Syntax​

Labels can be any value that starts with a unicode letter codepoint and can be followed by any number of unicode letter/number codepoints intermixed with dashes, dots, and underscores.

label 
label-with-dash
label_with_underscore
label.with.period
label-with_all.extra
l0-b1_f_10.boolean

You can encode non-breaking filenames directly as labels in many cases.

favicon.ico

You could treat the extension like a type tag:

can-run.count
can-run.test
Warning: Conventional Wisdom Abandoned

You might think that count and test are sub-elements of a can-run object but that is not how Rhumb works. Each line is a single label representing a single value in memory.

Label Semantics​

As indicated in the warning above, each label represents a value in memory. You might think that labels are "variables" as they are called in some languages. You would be right, although in Rhumb, labels can be "variables" and "values". The distinction between a mutable label and an immutable one is decided at assignment (and mutable labels can become immutable this way as well). More on the topic of assignment later.

Label Search Algorithm​

Labels exist within an environment and each new line of the program extends the environment in a time sequence. Each new addition to the environment is only accessible by code succeeding the assignment expression. However, time-series aside, if the current environment is exhausted, then the VM will traverse up to a lexically "outer" scope where it will again perform search up to the current line just outside the inner scope being exited. This continues up-and-outward until all environments have been exhausted at which time the VM will error out.