Editing Pico (programming language) (section)

== Language elements ==
De Meuter, Gonzalez, and D'Hondt describe the Pico syntax as being "two-tiered."<ref name="pico_d&r" /> The first layer consists of simple rules for writing small programs in a [[functional programming]] style.

=== Comments ===
Comments are surrounded by [[backquote#computer|backquote]]s ("`").

=== Variables ===
[[variable (programming)|Variables]] are dynamically [[data type|typed]]; Pico uses static [[scope (programming)|scope]].
 var: value

=== Functions ===
Functions, like everything in Pico, are [[first-class object]]s, meaning they can be assigned to variables and passed to and returned from functions. Also, there are no anonymous functions in Pico; functions must have a name.<ref name="pico_d&r" /> For example, a function, <code>func</code>, with two parameters, <code>param1</code> and <code>param2</code>, can be defined as:
 func(param1, param2): ...

Functions can be called with the following syntax:
 func(arg1, arg2)

=== Operators ===
Operators can be used as prefix or infix in Pico:
 +(5, 2)
 5 + 2

=== Data types ===
Pico has the following types: [[string (computer science)|string]], [[integer]], [[real number|real]] and [[array data type|tables]].

It does not have a native [[character (computing)#char|char]] type, so users should resort to size 1 strings.

Tables are compound data structures that may contain any of the regular data types.

Boolean types are represented by functions (as in [[lambda calculus]]).

=== Control structures ===
==== Conditional evaluation ====
Only the usual if statement is included
 if(condition, then, else)