🌍 Pangea / Pang

Welcome to Pangea Documentation

Pangea (also known as Pang) is a prefix notation (Polish notation) programming language implemented as an interpreter in Lua. It features a unique evaluation mechanism based on recursive descent and supports bilingual keywords (English and Italian).

What is Polish Notation?

In Polish (prefix) notation, operators come before their operands:

This notation eliminates the need for parentheses and operator precedence rules. Everything is evaluated left-to-right based on each operator's arity (number of arguments).

Key Features

🔤 Bilingual Support

Write programs in English or Italian:

// English
print add 5 6

// Italian
stampa somma 5 6

🔧 Core Capabilities

• Arithmetic: add, multiply, modulus
• Logic: if, while, equal, greater, not
• Variables: set/get with lexical scoping
• Functions: define_word for user-defined words
• Strings: Multi-word quoted strings
• File includes: Modular program composition

🎯 How It Works

The interpreter operates in three main phases:

Getting Started

Running Pangea

# REPL mode
lua src/pangea1/main.lua

# Execute a file
lua src/pangea1/main.lua tests/fizzbuzz.words

# Italian mode
lua src/pangea1/main.lua italian tests/fizzbuzz.parole

# Execute file then enter REPL
lua src/pangea1/main.lua tests/factorial.words -

Your First Program

print " Hello, World! "
print add 40 2

Hello, World!
42

Learn More

Explore the documentation sections:

• Polish Notation Tutorial - Deep dive into prefix notation
• Evaluation Mechanism - How the interpreter works (with animations!)
• Examples - FizzBuzz, factorial, and more
• Language Reference - Complete list of built-in words