Common Programming Concepts

This chapter covers concepts that appear in almost every programming language and how they work in Pint. Many programming languages have much in common at their core. None of the concepts presented in this chapter are unique to Pint, but we’ll discuss them in the context of Pint and particularly how they work in a constraint-based environment as opposed to imperative environments that you might be more familiar with.

Specifically, you’ll learn about local variables, basic types, custom types, match constructs, comments, and conditionals. These foundations will be in every Pint program, and learning them early will give you a strong core to start from.

Keywords: The Pint language has a set of keywords that are reserved for use by the language only, much as in other languages. Keep in mind that you cannot use these words as names of variables, predicates, types, or macros. Most of the keywords have special meanings, and you’ll be using them to do various tasks in your Pint programs; You can find a list of the keywords in Appendix A.