Common Programming Concepts

This chapter covers concepts that appear in almost every programming language and how they work in Calyxium. Many programming languages have much in common at their core. None of the concepts presented in this chapter are unique to Calyxium, but we’ll discuss them in the context of Calyxium and explain the conventions around using these concepts.

Specifically, you’ll learn about variables, basic types, functions, comments, and control flow. These foundations will be in every Calyxium program, and learning them early will give you a strong core to start from.

Keywords

The Calyxium language has a set of keywords that are reserved for use by the language only, much as in other languages. Keep in mind that you cannot use these words as names of variables or functions. Most of the keywords have special meanings, and you’ll be using them to do various tasks in your Calyxium programs; a few have no current functionality associated with them but have been reserved for functionality that might be added to Calyxium in the future. You can find a list of the keywords in Appendix A.