Neon is a high-level, statically typed, garbage collected, imperative programming language intended for teaching and learning the craft of programming. Its design borrows features from many popular languages, yet carefully avoids common errors encountered by beginning programmers in other languages.

Neon arithmetic uses decimal floating point, eliminating surprises that sometimes arise with binary floating point. Symbolic operators are unambiguous and usually have only one meaning. Pointers are supported, but null pointer errors are not possible by design. Names cannot be shadowed, eliminating a common source of confusion.

Neon also has features that can make learning programming practical and fun. There are standard libraries for graphics, sound, text mode interfaces (curses), networking, and more. The graphics and sound libraries recall the early days of the Apple ][ and Commodore 64. The curses interface provides interactive text mode capability. The ability to link to external libraries and to call external functions opens up a wide variety of possibilities. A well-defined extension interface supports third party library integration.

There are a variety of samples which demonstrate the capabilities of Neon.

What does Neon look like?

Neon programs start executing at the first statement in the source file. For example, a program can be as short as this:

print("Hello, World.")

Another well-known example is the classic “FizzBuzz” program:

-- For each integer from 1 to 100, print "Fizz" if the number
-- is divisible by 3, or "Buzz" if the number is divisible
-- by 5, or "FizzBuzz" if the number is divisible by both.
-- Otherwise, print the number itself.

FOR i := 1 TO 100 DO
    IF i MOD 15 = 0 THEN
        print("FizzBuzz")
    ELSIF i MOD 3 = 0 THEN
        print("Fizz")
    ELSIF i MOD 5 = 0 THEN
        print("Buzz")
    ELSE
        print("\(i)")
    END IF
END FOR

Neon syntax is not sensitive to whitespace, and does not have statement separators. Neon source code is case sensitive, but there are no requirements on the case of user-defined identifiers.