Introduction

Lipi (लिपि, “script”) is a small programming language whose keywords are Nepali words written in Roman letters. Instead of let, if and return, you write rakha, yadi and farkau. When something goes wrong, the error is in Nepali too, and it always says which line to look at.

rakha naam = "Ram";
bhana("Namaste, " + naam);

kaam jod(a, b) {
  farkau a + b;
}

yadi (jod(2, 3) > 4) {
  bhana("thulo!");
} natra {
  bhana("sano");
}

Running this prints:

Namaste, Ram
thulo!

Who it is for

• Nepali speakers learning to code. The ideas (variables, conditions, functions) are the same as in any language, but the words are ones you already know.
• Anyone curious about interpreters. Lipi is small enough to read in an afternoon. It follows Writing an Interpreter in Go closely, so you can read the book and the code side by side.

What it has

Numbers are whole numbers (integers). Strings go in double quotes and can contain Devanagari. Functions are values: you can store them, pass them around and return them from other functions.

Two ways to run it

1. In your browser, in the playground. Nothing to install.
2. On your computer, with the lipi command. See Getting started.