PLZ

The world's politest programming language

Summary

PLZ is an esoteric programming language (read: joke language) interpreted in Go. Despite its humorous origins, it is turing-complete and relatively feature-full.

Here's an example of a PLZ program. This will return the 10th fibonacci number (counting from 0):

let fibonacci be function(x) please
    if(x==0) please
        return 0 plz
    thanks
    if(x==1) please
        return 1 plz
    thanks
    return fibonacci(x - 1) + fibonacci(x - 2) plz
thanks

The above code will return 55.

Syntax

Variable Assignment

Variables are assigned with the 'be' operator.

let name be "Matt" plz
let age be 18 plz
let isCool be False plz

Data types

There are five currently supported data types in PLZ: Strings, booleans, integers, arrays, and hashtables (aka dictionaries, associative arrays).

Arrays

These are declared in a familiar way:

let fruits be ["apple", "banana", "pineapple", "kiwi"] plz

Values in an array can be accessed by their index:

fruits[1] //"banana"

Like in languages such as Python, arrays can contain data of different types.

let things be ["this is a string", "but we can also have ints", 1, 2, 3]

Arrays can also contain other arrays!

let arrs be [ [0,1], [2,3] ] plz arrs[0]
arrs[1] // [2,3]
arrs[0][1] // 1

Hash Tables

Hash tables/dictionaries are declared and accessed as follows:

let ages be {"Mark": 35, "Sergey": 46, "Jeff": 55} plz
ages["Jeff"] //55

Accessing a key that has not been assigned will not throw an error, instead simply returning Null:

ages["Jimmy"] //None

Dictionary keys can be Strings, booleans, or integers. Dictionary values can be of any type:

let dict be {
    "num": 45,
    22: "Grover Cleveland",
    "firstfive": ["Washington", "Adams", "Jefferson", "Madison", "Monroe"]
} plz

Standard Library

PLZ also comes with a basic standard library. The standard library is being expanded at the moment. The currently implemented functions are described here.

print

The print function prints values to the console. It takes any amount of arguments greater or equal to one, of any data type.

print("hello, world!") plz //hello, world!
print("My", "name", "is", "Jonas") plz //"My \n name \n is \n Jonas \n"
print("Here is my todo list:", ["Clean room", "check emails", "go to the gym"])

len

Returns the length of a string OR an array.

len("hello") //5
len(["one", "two", "three"]) //3

assign

Reassigns a value in an array or hash table.

let resources be ["brick", "lumber", "grain", "ore", "sheep"] plz
assign(resources, 4, "wool") plz
resources[4] //"wool"

let student be {"name": "Matt", "major": "Econ"} plz
assign(student, "major", "CS") plz
student["major"] //"CS"

append

Takes an existing array and a variable; returns a new array with the variable appended.

let pidigits be [3, 1, 4, 1] plz
let pidigits be append(pidigits, 5) plz
pidigits //[3, 1, 4, 1, 5]

peek

Returns the last value of an array

let fruits be ["apple", "orange", "banana"] plz
peek(fruits) //"banana"

first

Returns the first value of an array

let fruits be ["apple", "orange", "banana"] plz
first(fruits) //"apple"

rest

Returns an array with the first element removed

let fruits be ["apple", "orange", "banana"] plz
rest(fruits) //["orange", "banana"]