wren

Values

Values are the built-in atomic object types that all other objects are composed of. They can be created through literals, expressions that evaluate to a value. All values are immutable—once created, they do not change. The number 3 is always the number 3. The string "frozen" can never have its character array modified in place.

Booleans #

A boolean value represents truth or falsehood. There are two boolean literals, true and false. Their class is Bool.

Numbers #

Like other scripting languages, Wren has a single numeric type: double-precision floating point. Number literals look like you expect coming from other languages:

0
1234
-5678
3.14159
1.0
-12.34
0.0314159e02
0.0314159e+02
314.159e-02
0xcaffe2

Numbers are instances of the Num class.

Strings #

A string is an array of bytes. Typically, they store characters encoded in UTF-8, but you can put any byte values in there, even zero or invalid UTF-8 sequences. (You might have some trouble printing the latter to your terminal, though.)

String literals are surrounded in double quotes:

"hi there"

They can also span multiple lines. When they do, the newline character within the string will always be \n (\r\n is normalized to \n).

"hi
there,
again"

Escaping #

A handful of escape characters are supported:

"\0" // The NUL byte: 0.
"\"" // A double quote character.
"\\" // A backslash.
"\%" // A percent sign.
"\a" // Alarm beep. (Who uses this?)
"\b" // Backspace.
"\e" // ESC character.
"\f" // Formfeed.
"\n" // Newline.
"\r" // Carriage return.
"\t" // Tab.
"\v" // Vertical tab.


"\x48"        // Unencoded byte     (2 hex digits)
"\u0041"      // Unicode code point (4 hex digits)
"\U0001F64A"  // Unicode code point (8 hex digits)

A \x followed by two hex digits specifies a single unencoded byte:

System.print("\x48\x69\x2e") //> Hi.

A \u followed by four hex digits can be used to specify a Unicode code point:

System.print("\u0041\u0b83\u00DE") //> AஃÞ

A capital \U followed by eight hex digits allows Unicode code points outside of the basic multilingual plane, like all-important emoji:

System.print("\U0001F64A\U0001F680") //> 🙊🚀

Strings are instances of class String.

Interpolation #

String literals also allow interpolation. If you have a percent sign (%) followed by a parenthesized expression, the expression is evaluated. The resulting object’s toString method is called and the result is inserted in the string:

System.print("Math %(3 + 4 * 5) is fun!") //> Math 23 is fun!

Arbitrarily complex expressions are allowed inside the parentheses:

System.print("wow %((1..3).map {|n| n * n}.join())") //> wow 149

An interpolated expression can even contain a string literal which in turn has its own nested interpolations, but doing that gets unreadable pretty quickly.

Raw strings #

A string literal can also be created using triple quotes """ which is parsed as a raw string. A raw string is no different from any other string, it’s just parsed in a different way.

Raw strings do not process escapes and do not apply any interpolation.

"""hi there"""

When a raw string spans multiple lines and a triple quote is on it’s own line, any whitespace on that line will be ignored. This means the opening and closing lines are not counted as part of the string when the triple quotes are separate lines, as long as they only contain whitespace (spaces + tabs).

  """
    Hello world
  """

The resulting value in the string above has no newlines or trailing whitespace. Note the spaces in front of the Hello are preserved.

    Hello world

A raw string will be parsed exactly as is in the file, unmodified. This means it can contain quotes, invalid syntax, other data formats and so on without being modified by Wren.

"""
  {
    "hello": "wren",
    "from" : "json"
  }
"""

One more example, embedding wren code inside a string safely.

"""
A markdown string with embedded wren code example.

    class Example {
      construct code() {
        //
      }
    }
"""

Ranges #

A range is a little object that represents a consecutive range of numbers. They don’t have their own dedicated literal syntax. Instead, the number class implements the .. and ... operators to create them:

3..8

This creates a range from three to eight, including eight itself. If you want a half-inclusive range, use ...:

4...6

This creates a range from four to six not including six itself. Ranges are commonly used for iterating over a sequences of numbers, but are useful in other places too. You can pass them to a list‘s subscript operator to return a subset of the list, for example, or on a String, the substring in that range:

var list = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]
var slice = list[1..3]
System.print(slice) //> [b, c, d]

var string = "hello wren"
var wren = string[-4..-1]
System.print(wren) //> wren

Their class is Range.

Null #

Wren has a special value null, which is the only instance of the class Null. (Note the difference in case.) It functions a bit like void in some languages: it indicates the absence of a value. If you call a method that doesn’t return anything and get its returned value, you get null back.