Example Snippets

Example Epoch Snippets

Curious what the language looks like, or how certain common coding problems are solved in Epoch? Look no further!

• Arithmetic
• Assertions
• Hello World
• String Concatenation

Arithmetic

Doing math on both integers and floating point types should be comfortable and familiar:

entrypoint :
{
    integer test = 40
    integer more = 4
    integer less = 2
    integer math = 6
    integer stuff = 111
    integer rocks = 1

    integer result = (test + more) - less    // 42
    integer evil = math * stuff / rocks      // 666
}

Assertions

Epoch allows you to halt a program immediately if some critical invariant is violated:

entrypoint :
{
     // Make sure that true is still true:
     assert(true)

     // Validate some arithmetic:
     assert(40 + 2 == 42)

     // This line would crash the program immediately upon execution:
     //assert(false)
}

Hello World

Here's a simple example of what Epoch programs look like. This is a slightly over-engineered version of Hello World that illustrates some common type system idioms from Epoch:

//
// A simple Epoch program
//

// Declare an algebraic sum type
type OptionalString : string | nothing

// Define a function
Display : string optstr
{
    print(optstr)
}

// Overload the function
Display : nothing
{
    print("End of line.")
}

// Entry point function
entrypoint :
{
    OptionalString hello = "Hello, world!"
    OptionalString blank = nothing
    
    Display(hello)
    Display(blank)
}

String Concatenation

Strings are a first-class type in Epoch. Concatenation is expressed using the ; operator to disambiguate from arithmetic addition:

entrypoint :
{
    string h = "Hello"
    string s = " "
    string w = "World"

    string message = h ; s ; w
    print(message)
}

More Examples

There is plenty more to see! We recommend exploring the .epoch files in the repository for more examples of how the code looks and feels.