Lexical syntax

SPL defines a set of rules to determine the syntax of a program.

SPL files are written in Unicode with UTF-8 encoding. Most syntactic elements, including keywords and identifiers, use the subset of Unicode that overlaps with ASCII characters (the subset 32-126 of the Latin-1 alphabet ISO 8859-1). Restricting identifiers to ASCII facilitates interoperability with native languages like C++ and with file systems. The only two constructs where other Unicode characters are valid are Unicode string literals and comments. Identifiers start with an ASCII letter or underscore, followed by ASCII letters, digits, or underscores. Identifiers of formal parameters of composite operators start with a dollar. The syntax for literal values of primitive types (numbers, Booleans, strings, and other types) is similar to that of Java™ or C++.

SPL has two forms of comments: single-line comments (from // to the end of the line) and delimited comments (between /* and */). Delimited comments can span multiple lines, and can be followed by regular code in the same line.

SPL syntax is not sensitive to indentation or line breaks. SPL syntax is case-sensitive. For example, mud and Mud are different identifiers.

An SPL keyword, such as if or stream, cannot be used as an identifier. SPL uses lexical scoping for identifiers. In other words, a declaration in an inner scope shadows declarations of the same identifier in statically enclosing scopes. SPL allows textual uses of function and stream names to precede their definition to support recursive functions and cyclic stream graphs. SPL does not permit synonymous entities of different categories in the same scope. For example, the code f :  for(;;) { f f = new f().f(); } is valid in Java™, even though the same identifier refers to a label, a type, a variable, a constructor, and a method. In SPL, however, it is a compile-time error if a program declares both an operator that is named f and a function that is named f in the same scope. As another example, it is a compile-time error if a program declares both a type that is named t and a variable named t in the same scope. In other words, SPL does not segregate scopes by identifier categories, unlike, for example Java™. That also means that identifiers in inner scopes shadow identifiers in outer scopes even when they are of a different category. For example, a locally declared stream s hides any function s in an outer scope. As seen later, namespaces and composite operators provide not only a scope but also support disambiguation with qualified names, and data that is hiding with private members.