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# Ludus, in Clojure
## Or, CLudus
![Ludus logo](logo.png)
## Ludus: A friendly, dynamic, functional language
A reference implementation of an interpreter for the Ludus programming language. It's written in Clojure. It's a tree-walk interpreter, very slow. (We are following the Nystrom path from _Crafting Interpreters_.)
A reference implementation of an interpreter for the Ludus programming language, using Clojure as a host language.
Ludus is part of the [_Thinking with Computers_ project](https://thinking-with-computers.github.io), run by Scott Richmond at the University of Toronto. Ludus is our research language, which aspires to be a free translation of Logo for the 2020s.
### Status
Pre-alpha, still under active development. See [the ludus-spec repo for progress notes and additional documentation](https://github.com/thinking-with-computers/ludus-spec/blob/main/todo.md).
### Use
* Clone this repo.
- `git clone https://github.com/thinking-with-computers/cludus`
* Have Clojure and Leiningen installed.
* `lein run {script}`, it runs your script in Ludus!
* Ludus is very much a work in progress; see [the ludus-spec repo for progress notes](https://github.com/thinking-with-computers/ludus-spec/blob/main/todo.md).
- On a Mac: `brew install clojure leiningen`
* `lein run {script}`, it runs your script.
* Alternately, download a binary on the [releases page](https://github.com/thinking-with-computers/cludus/releases).
### `Hello, world!`
Ludus is a scripting language. At current it does not have a REPL (our aim is to get interactive coding absolutely correct).
Either
```
"Hello, world!"
```
`=> "Hello, world!"`
Ludus scripts (and blocks) simply return their last expression; this script returns the bare string (to `stdout`) and exits.
Or:
```
print ("Hello, world!")
```
```
=> Hello, world!
=> :ok
```
Or, you can use a the `print` function, which sends a string to `stdout`. Because `print` returns the keyword `:ok` when it completes, that is the result of the last expression in the script--and so Ludus also prints this.
### More on Ludus
Most of the (very active, somewhat messy) thinking about Ludus is housed in the [ludus-spec repository](https://github.com/thinking-with-computers/ludus-spec).