Introduction

About mint

Mint is an object-oriented scripting language. The file extension for a mint script is .mn.

Running mint

Mint can be run in interactive mode by simply launching mint without any arguments:

$ mint

Alternatively, mint can run a script file by providing the path to the file along with optional script arguments:

$ mint ./my-script.mn arg1 arg2 arg3

It's also possible to run a script inline with the --exec option:

$ mint --exec "print { 'Hello world !\n' }"

Syntax

A mint script is a sequence of instructions separated by the line feed character. A \ character can be added before a line feed character to continue the sequence of instructions onto the next line. Additionally, a mint script can contain blocks delimited by braces (started with { and finished with }).

Mint uses UTF-8 as its character encoding, therefore a mint script can only contain ASCII or UTF-8 characters.

Mint employs a C++-like comment syntax. A comment can begin with // and continue until the end of the line, or be enclosed between /* and */. A line starting with #! is also considered a comment (useful for adding a shebang).

Garbage Collector

Mint utilizes a garbage collector to automatically handle memory deallocation. This garbage collector uses reference counting and a mark-and-sweep algorithm to handle reference cycles. To reduce computation time, garbage collection with the mark-and-sweep algorithm only occurs when a thread has finished. The collection can also be initiated manually using the mint.garbagecollector module.

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