1.1 Hello World

println is a built-in procedure that takes a string and prints it to the terminal. This function causes stdout to write a string, it also write a new-line character ("\n") after the string. It has a companion function called print that does the same, but leaves off the new-line.

Be aware: That dollar sign at the end of println isn't actually part of its name. It is a syntactic element of Felix that carries special meaning--it "contains" whatever comes after it in parentheses. If we have a function foo(a,b), we can call it by passing in parameters denoted by parenthesis (i.e. foo(1,2); ). Alternatively, we can use $ to save us a little typing. foo $ 1, 2; is the same as foo(1,2);.

If you've worked with Haskell you may recognize this behavior, except that in Haskell the dollar sign cannot touch any symbols next to it. Haskell would consider this part of the symbol.

"Hello world" is just a string of characters. Strings are a primitive data type in Felix and come equipped with all the modern conveniences one would expect in a modern language.

Assuming you store this in the file hello.flx to can run it by entering the following into the terminal:

flx hello

Behind the scenes a lot happens when you run this command. Felix checks the code for errors, translates it to C++ code, compiles the C++ code to a native binary, links it (including any required libraries), and then runs it. Furthermore, if Felix detects that it has already compiled everything, it will skip over these steps, or parts thereof and execute the existing copy.

You can see this for yourself by executing flx hello a second time. It was a bit slow on the first run--because of the compile process mentioned above--but subsequent runs will load much faster.

Our opinion is that this is a viable method for working with programs. Many compilers take longer than Felix does and require too much attention to compilation. Plus, what you get as an output is a fast application--faster than any virtual machine.