Values

A value in Neko can be one of the following :

• Null: the special value null is used for uninitialized variables as well as programmer/language specific coding techniques.
• Integer: integers can be represented in either decimal form (such as 12345 or -12), or hexadecimal (0x1A2B3C4D).
• Floats: floating-point numbers are represented using a period (such as 12.345 or -0.123).
• Boolean: booleans are represented by the following two lowercase identifiers: true and false.
• Strings: strings are surrounded by double quotes (for example: "foo", or "hello,\nworld !", or "My name is \"Bond\\James Bond\"."). Neko strings are mutable, which means that you can modify them.
• Arrays: arrays are an integer-indexed table of values, with the index starting at 0. They provide fast random access to their elements.
• Objects: an object is a table, which associates an identifier or a string to a value. How objects are created and managed is explained later.
• Functions: a function is also a value in Neko, and thus can be stored in any variable.
• Abstract: an abstract value is C data that cannot be accessed from a Neko program.

Some Notes:

• Integers have 31 bits for virtual machine performance reasons. An API for full 32-bit integers is available through a standard library.
• Floating-point numbers are 64-bit double-precision floating points values.
• Strings are sequences of 8-bit bytes. A string can contain \0 characters. The length of a string is determined by the number of bytes in it, and not by the number of characters before the first \0.