iodine/README.md

Iodine - a statically typed, interpreted language

Iodine is a programming language with the intention of having the most readable code possible (without getting into things like block coding or LLM's). The interpreter is written in C++.

Iodine is NOT intended for production use at present. If you build your mission-critical application with Bogus, good luck. Things are going to break very often.

Compiling Iodine

If you've got bob installed, make use of the supplied Bobfile by running bob. Otherwise, run:

g++ src/*.cpp -o iodine

Using iodine

Usage: iodine [file]
Options:
    --debug    Enable debug mode
    --help     Show this help message

Debug mode is useful for reporting bugs, which are going to be very frequent (of course). If something doesn't work and you're sure the syntax is right, create an issue in this repo.

Writing iodine

Print things:

println "Hello!";

Print things without a new line using print.

Set a variable:

let str myString "This is a string variable";

Note: Valid types are int (equivalent to C++ int), dec (equivalent to C++ double), str (equivalent to C++ string), and bool (equivalent to C++ bool)

Use a variable:

let int myNum 5;

println myNum;

Change a variable:

let int myNum 7;

myNum = 10;

myNum ++;
myNum --;

myNum += 3;
myNum -= 2;

Do some math:

println 9 + 10;

Get user input from the console:

let str userInput input;

println input;

Use an if statement to compare things:

let int myInt 4;
let int myOtherInt 3;

if myInt == myOtherInt {
    println "The variables are the same!";
}

myOtherInt = 4;

if myInt == myOtherInt {
    println "The variables are now the same after changing it";
}

Make a while loop to do things over and over:

let int myInt 1;

while myInt != 6 {
    println myInt;
    myInt = myInt + 1;
}
println "The loop has ended";

Sidenote: Loops are very unstable at present. If you find a loop-related bug please let me know.

More features will be added in future.

Planned features

• Lists: It's a list of stuff. str will become a list of characters (meaning a chr type will be made).
• while statements: Come on, we gotta have a Turing complete language!
• File input/output: I feel this is going to be complex.

Far-off features

Note: These features are not guaranteed to come to fruition. I am very good at getting distracted by other things.

• Functions
• Network requests
• Libraries and importing files
• Webserver

Licensing

Iodine is licenced under the GNU General Public Licence v3.0. See LICENSE or here for more details.

The Iodine Logo © 2025 by Maxwell Jeffress is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. See here for more details.