About

Phoenix is an interpreted, procedural proramming language written in Java SE 1.5. Phoenix is similar in style to Python and C and features a full complement of operators, and a large library of functions. Phoenix is designed to have many of the useful functions seen in modern programming languages, while making several key upgrades in syntax and readability. Since Phoenix is built in Java, using it from within a Java application is a breeze. Here is brief overview of the features of Phoenix:

• Excellent interoperability with Java. Phoenix programs can be run from Java in two lines of code. Java applications can insert their own functions into Phoenix for use at runtime, so that the Phoenix program can send information back to the Java application.
• Functions with left-hand and right-hand arguments. In Phoenix, one can define functions that take arguments both before and after the name of the function. This improves upoon redability. Unlike most programming languages in which functions take the form function (arg1, arg2, ... argN), Phoenix programs can have functions which take any of the following forms:
  • function (arg1, arg2, ... argN)
  • (arg1, arg2, ... argN) function
  • (arg1, arg2, ... argM) function (argM+1,argM+2, ... argN)
• Better designed operators. Phoenix uses slightly different operators and adds a few new ones to the stand mix of operators. For example, Phoenix has a rounding operator which rounds one operand to the nearest multiple of the second. Also, the carrot, ^, operator is now exponentiation (not bitwise xor) and a new oplus operator, (+), serves the function of a logical xor.
• Flexible break statements. In Phoenix, when using a break statement to break out of a loop or switch case statement, one can append a number to it (e.g. break 3), to indicate how many loops or case statements should be broken out of . To break out of all existing loops, simply use the break all statement.

The first version, Phoenix: Arion, is nearing completion and should be available by the end of this year. The development of the language itself is almost complete and the last part remaining is thorough documentation. However, I would like to be able to release future versions of Phoenix. Planned for version 2, Phoenix: Behemoth, are the following features:

• Operator overloading.
• Passing functions as function parameters.
• Importing modules of functions

Download

Click here to download the latest version (Phoenix: Arion v0.9.1).