YS Syntax Basics

Let's start learning about YS syntax by looking at a simple YS program.

Here's a program to print some numbers (10 of them by default) from the fibonacci sequence:

!YS-v0

defn main(n=10):
  loop a 0, b 1, i 1:
    say: a
    when i < n:
      recur: b, (a + b), i.++

When you run a YS program using the ys interpreter command it:

• Compiles the YS code to Clojure code
• Evaluates the Clojure code

Let's try it (requesting 8 numbers from the fibonacci sequence):

$ ys fib.ys 8
0
1
1
2
3
5
8
13

Great, but to understand it better let's look at the Clojure code that it compiled to:

$ ys -c fib.ys
(defn main
 ([n]
  (loop [a 0 b 1 i 1]
   (say a)
   (when (< i n) (recur b (add+ a b) (inc i)))))
 ([] (main 10)))
(apply main ARGS)

note:

When learning or debugging YS programs, it's often very helpful to look at
the generated Clojure code using `ys -c`.

We can see 2 top-level forms in the generated Clojure code. The first is the main function definition, and the second is the call to the main function with the command-line arguments. That's interesting, we didn't actually call main in our ys program.

The YS compiler automatically adds a call to main if it detects the main was defined but not called in the program.

The Clojure main function has 2 bodies, one with an argument n and the other without any arguments. In the YS program there is only one function body, but not that the n argument has a default value of 10. Clojure doesn't support default arguments, but the YS compiler can generate a second body that takes no arguments and calls the first body with the default.