All numbers in Fetlang are represented as fractions: a numerator over a denominator. As a result, there is very little floating point math in Fetlang.
Fraction literals are represented by words. For example, -45153/71 is represented by:
negative forty five thousand one hundred and fifty three over
seventy one
When printed to stdout, fractions are written with commas:
negative forty five thousand, one hundred and fifty three over
seventy one
When read from stdin, fractions are inputed as:
-45153/71
Normally, 0/0 is not allowed, but when inputed by the user it is equal to 1/1.
A variable in bondage (reference type) is bound to particular fraction, and decays to that fraction. The major difference is that it can be rebound to a different fraction, namely a fraction in a chain
This is the only way to iterate a chain using the core fetish
Chains are lists of fractions. They can be used as strings, or just an array of numbers. When printed as a string, each fraction is converted into an ASCII code.
Chain literals are similar to C char* literals:
"Hello World!\n"
But are escaped by octal only.
Chain literals cannot be concatenated by placing them next to each other, and multi-line chain literals cannot exist.
Chains are not null-terminated, but their literals are.
Streams are treated like chains in Fetlang. The three stream builtin variables are: stdout, stdin, and stderr. They are referred to by identifiers as shown in reference/core.md