Data types, weak and strong typing.

The various data types that are understood by RainCode are:

• Integer (signed 32 bits)
• Real (IEEE 64 bits)
• Boolean (TRUE and FALSE)
• Character strings, made of 0 or more ASCII characters. There is no hard limit on the length of such character strings, but implementation issues suggest that one restricts oneself to strings of 64k or less.
• Non-terminals, that denote nodes of the parse tree that is currently being analyzed.
• Lists, that can contain 0 or more values of any type, including lists.
• Environments

  which are objects that provide common services such as string manipulation, math functions, etc...

RainCode is a strongly typed language, in the sense that invoking some operation on a type for which this operation is not defined (such as multiplication for character string, for instance) will cause a runtime-error. On the other hand, such improper use is not detected until the actual statement is executed, as opposed as truly strongly typed languages (such as C++, YAFL or Eiffel) where such detection happens at compile-time. One might claim that, compared to such languages that are statically strongly typed languages, RainCode is a dynamically strongly typed language.