About the documentation

A high-level overview of how the Alan documentation organized will help you know how to quickly find what you are looking for:

  • Tutorials take you through some Alan examples. Start here if you’re new to Alan.
  • How-to guides are recipes. They guide you through the steps involved in addressing key problems and use-cases. They are more advanced than tutorials and assume some knowledge of how Alan works.
  • Topic guides discuss key topics and concepts at a fairly high level and provide useful background information and explanation about the internals of the Alan syntax, module system and compiler.
  • Reference guides contains technical reference for built-in APIs and data types, the standard library and opcodes. They describe how it works and how to use it but assume that you have a basic understanding of key concepts.

Throughout the documentation you will find runnable code snippets, like the one below, that are included for clarity:

import @std/app

on app.start {
  app.print("Hit the play button to see me run!");
  emit app.exit 0;
}