Before you are able to run icelang code, you will need to set up the icelang interpreter. The icelang interpreter is a program that reads and understands your icelang source code, and then executes the instructions you wrote.
Although this may change in the future, there is currently no option to download a pre-built executable of the icelang interpreter - You will have to download and build the source code yourself. Don't worry if you've never done that before - Cargo (the build system for the programming language I wrote the interpreter in) makes this process very easy!
To get started, install Cargo on your computer by following the instructions on
the Rust website. You will know you
have completed this step successfully when running the command cargo --version
in your terminal gives you no error messages and displays your version of Cargo.
Next, download the icelang interpreter source code from the official repository on GitHub. You can do so by clicking the green "Code" dropdown button towards the top right of the screen, then clicking "Download ZIP".
Once you've downloaded the source code as a ZIP, extract the zip contents to
somewhere on your computer. Open a terminal and navigate to the folder you
extracted. Your current working directory should contain a few files and
folders, including a folder called src and a file called Cargo.toml. Now,
run the command cargo build --release to compile the source code into a binary
executable for your computer. Once compilation finishes, there will be a binary
executable called ice (or ice.exe if you're on Windows) in the
target/release/ directory. This is the icelang interpreter - you can now move
that file wherever you'd like on your computer, and you no longer need the
source code.
To test that you've done everything correctly, open a terminal and navigate to
the folder containing the icelang interpreter binary you built in the previous
step. Run the command ./ice --version (or ./ice.exe --version if you're on
Windows) and you should see a message indicating your version of icelang.
You can run icelang code in two ways: in a REPL (interactive shell) and from
.ice files. This is how to run icelang code in a REPL.
Open a terminal and navigate to the folder containing the icelang interpreter
binary. Run the executable with the command ./ice (or ./ice.exe if you're on
Windows). You should see a welcome message and help information about the REPL.
To run icelang code, simply type a line of icelang code into the terminal and
press enter. Your code will be evaluated, and the result will be printed to the
screen. Try the following line of code:
println("Hello, world!");
When you're done, type exit to exit the REPL.
You can run icelang code in two ways: in a REPL (interactive shell) and from
.ice files. This is how to run icelang code from .ice files.
First, create a text file on your computer with the extension .ice (ex:
hello.ice). Write the source code of your program in that file. Try the
following example program:
println("Hello, world!");
Once you're done writing your program, save and close the file. Open a terminal
and navigate to the folder containing the icelang interpreter binary. Run the
executable with the path to your source code file as an argument (ex:
./ice ~/Desktop/hello.ice). The icelang interpreter will now run your program,
and you will see the output of your program in the terminal.
If you do not already have experience with another programming language, icelang probably isn't a great choice to learn programming with. If you're interested in learning to code, I'd recommend you start with a language like Python or JavaScript.
If you do already have experience with another programming language, check out the icelang Guidebook for a general overview of the syntax and features of icelang. You can also check out the examples folder to see some example icelang programs.