Introduction

👋 Hello World!

You're reading the official documentation for MathFlow.

What is MathFlow?

MathFlow is a lightweight and expressive scripting language designed for mathematical expressions and calculations. It provides a simple and intuitive syntax for performing mathematical operations, including support for standard arithmetic, functions like sin, cos, tan, and other functions.

What MathFlow is not?

WARNING

• MathFlow is not a fully-fledged scripting language. This means that it can not be used to build applications by itself.

Main Objectives

The main goals of this project include expressiveness, focus, and simplicity. This implies that the development of this project tends in the direction of providing a better and mathematics-centric usecase.

How it Works

This section describes how MathFlow is able to work.

This library API exposes the evaluate function that takes the MathFlow code and returns a result. Below are the stages the source code undergoes to produce the result;

• A global scope that holds all variables is created
• The source code is then split into individual statements. This process involves;
  • Trimming whitespaces
  • Expanding composite terms like 2x into 2*x
  • Varible declarations are extracted, their assigned value or expression executed and stored in the global scope variables dictionary
  • Empty lines or statements are ignored
• Every statement in the generated list of statements is executed independently. This stage involves the followings;
  • The statement is tokenized to generate a list of identified tokens
  • The tokens are then parsed into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) basing on the order of operations and precedence of the operators used.
  • The tree is then interpreted by running through the every node identifying the node type and applying the corresponding operation or computation.
  • The output of the interpreter is a numerical value.
• The resultant value of the last statement is returned with the final state of the global scope.