simpol

The first program will be a very easy one with very little real purpose beyond demonstrating various capabilities of the development environment. Although the "Hello World" program is quite traditional, for this example we have chose to create a program that outputs the current date and time. This has the necessary flexibility that is required for our demonstration. The source code in its entirety is shown below:

 
function main()
  datetime dt

  dt =@ datetime.new()
  dt.setnow()

  string s

  s = .tostr(dt.year(), 10) + "/" + .tostr(dt.month(), 10) + "/" + \
      .tostr(dt.dayinmonth(), 10) + "  " + .tostr(dt.hours(), 10) + ":" + \
      .tostr(dt.minutes(), 10) + ":" + .tostr(dt.seconds, 10)
      
end function s

Please type the program in, don't copy it from this document. The process of entering the source code will demonstrate a number of the features that we will discuss as we continue.

As you type in the first part of the code, as shown in the following picture, a number of things may occur to you. First, the various words and punctuation in the program appear in different colors. Color-coding of the source code is quite common today and assists the reader in immediately being able to focus on the parts of the program that are of interest as well as visually pointing out when things may have been done incorrectly. Which colors are used for what parts of the programming language are user-configurable. By default, language keywords appear in blue, identifiers in black, strings in red, data types in cyan, operators in magenta, and comments in green.

The first portion of the learn01 program

The picture above shows the inline programming help for the datetime type. Since the new() method is the only item in the list, it is already pre-selected. Merely by pressing the tab key the text will be entered at the cursor position. Regular use of this feature can greatly reduce the time it takes to write programs, as well as reducing the number of typing errors.

Once the new method name has been entered when the open parentheses is typed the inline help shows the arguments for the call to the method, as can be seen from the following picture.

The inline help for the new() method

Even when using a variable that is declared to be of the type datetime such as in our program the properties and methods of the object are shown by the inline help while typing the code. To select a different one than the first, just type the first one or two letters until the correct one is selected and then press the tab key to have the rest of the item entered at the cursor position.

The inline help for the datetime object

Every component in SIMPOL has inline help, such as the intrinsic function .tostr() as seen in this picture. In some cases, like that of functions, the help only shows which parameter is current and needs to be filled out as well as information about its data type and possibly the parameter name and default value.

The inline help for the .tostr() intrinsic function

Now enter the remainder of the program as shown in the earlier source code excerpt. Once the entire source code has been entered, it should look like the following picture. At this point we are ready to build and test the project.

The complete source code for the first project