It details how the project itself works, not how to write code in it. If you would like to know how to write code in Spindle, please look at the user documentation!
With that out of the way, this document will lay out how Spindle works and will help you contribute to it.
When you write code on using the spindle, you are told to run it though the shell.py file. This file exists to provide a front end for the language and to feed your code into the interpreter (in the spindle.py file) but is not necessary.
All Spindle code starts out as a string of text. The very first thing Spindle does is get it ready to run. This step of the process is called Semi-parsing and does three very critical things.
The first thing the semi-parser checks for is a RUN("") command. This is not apart of the college board standards but is necessary for the desktop experience. This is called a "command" because it is technically outside of the spindle language but included in the file. RUN() takes one parameter, which is the full name of the file that you would like to run (including all extensions) as a string. When you execute a RUN command, Spindle will look for a file with that name, and feed that code into the semi-parser. If there is no RUN command, this process is skipped and the code written directly in the terminal is ran instead.
The second thing the semi-parser does is look at your program code and add "ELSE{}" to any of your if statements that do not have an else statement. It does this to fix a critical bug where an if statement without an else causes the program to nullrun, which is where spindle stops running code completely, or return a fauxerror, which is where spindle returns an error that simply doesn't make sense.
The last, and most major thing the semi parser does is check whether your program has a function in it. If and only if your program has a function in it, the semi parser will chop your code into pieces in such a way that function definitions are isolated. Each piece will then be fed into Spindle.
PROCEDURE add(a,b) {
IF (a == b) {
RETURN
}
RETURN a + b
}
DISPLAY("hi")
add(10,40)
PROCEDURE sub(a,b) {
RETURN a - b
}
sub(40,10)
Becomes (each code block is put into Spindle:
PROCEDURE add(a,b) {
IF (a == b) {
RETURN
} ELSE{}
RETURN a + b
}
DISPLAY("hi")
add(10,40)
PROCEDURE sub(a,b) {
RETURN a - b
}
sub(40,10)