Basic Syntax of Nit

The syntax of Nit follows the Pascal tradition and is inspired by various script languages (especially Ruby). Its main objective is readability.

Indentation is not meaningful in Nit; blocks usually starts with a specific keyword and finish with end. Newlines are only meaningful at the end of declarations, at the end of statements, and after some specific keywords. The philosophy is that the newline is ignored if something (a statement, a declaration, or whatever) obviously needs more input; while the newline terminates lines that seems completed. See the complete Nit grammar for more details.

# a first complete statement that outputs "2"
print 1 + 1
# the second statement is not yet finished
print 2 +
# the end of the second statement, outputs "4"
2

Nit aims to achieve some uniformity in its usage of the common punctuation: equal (=) is for assignment, double equal (==) is for equality test, column (:) is for type declaration, dot (.) is for polymorphism, comma (,) separates elements, and quad (::) is for explicit designation.

Identifiers

Identifiers of modules, variables, methods, attributes and labels must begin with a lowercase letter and can be followed by letters, digits, or underscores. However, the usage of uppercase letters (and camelcase) is discouraged and the usage of underscore to separate words in identifiers is preferred: some_identifier.

Identifiers of classes and types must begin with an uppercase letter and can be followed by letters, digits, or underscores. However the usage of camelcase is preferred for class identifiers while formal types should be written in all uppercase: SomeClass and SOME_VIRTUAL_TYPE.

Style

While Nit does not enforce any kind of source code formatting, the following is encouraged:

• indentation uses the tabulation character and is displayed as 8 spaces;

• lines are less than 80 characters long;

• binary operators have spaces around them: 4 + 5, x = 5;

• columns (:) and commas (,) have a space after them but not before: var x: X, [1, 2, 3];

• parenthesis and brackets do not need spaces around them;

• superfluous parenthesis should be avoided;

• the do of methods and the single do is on its own line and not indented;

• the other do are not on a newline.

Comments and Documentation

As in many script languages, comments begin with a sharp (#) and run up to the end of the line. Currently, there is no multiline-comments.

A comment block right before any definition of module, class, or property, is considered as its documentation and will be displayed as such by the autodoc. At this point, documentation is displayed verbatim (no special formatting or meta-information).

# doc. of foo
module foo

# doc. of Bar
class Bar
   # doc. of baz
   fun baz do end
end