Falcon Programming Language

The home of Falcon at www.falconpl.org is now a regular on my browser. The official release is still shy of 1.0 and is known as Piuma, or 0.8.10.

Falcon is being built by a team but it is the child of Giancarlo Niccolai, who was looking for an alternative scripting and embeddable language which would be multi-paradigm. Falcon is an object-oriented and a messaging language which can also be viewed as either procedural or functional and which allows all four to co-exist. The emphasis is on both flexibility and performance.

Running Falcon in MSys (the Mingw version for Win32) with -? gives the following:

Usage: falcon [options] file.fal [script options]
Options:
-a assemble the given module (a Falcon Assembly '.fas' file)
-c compile only the given source
-C Check for memory allocation correctness.
-D Set directive (as =).
-e Set given encoding as default for VM I/O.
-E Source files are in encoding (overrides -e)
-f force recompilation of modules even when .fam are found
-h/-? this help
-l Set preferential language of loaded modules
-L set path for 'load' directive
-m do NOT compile in memory (use temporary files)
-M do NOT save the compiled modules in '.fam' files
-o output to instead of [filename.xxx]
-p preload (pump in) given module
-P use load path also to find main module
-r do NOT recompile sources to fulfil load directives
-s compile via assembly
-S produce an assembly output
-t generate a syntactic tree (for logic debug)
-T force input parsing as .ftd (template document)
-v print copyright notice and version and exit
-w Add an extra console wait after program exit
-x execute a binary '.fam' module
-y write string translation table for the module

Paths must be in falcon file name format: directory separatros must be slashes [/] and multiple entries must be entered separed by a semicomma (';')
File names may be set to '-' meaning standard input or output (depending on the option)

One interesting feature is the functional sequence operator .[cascade which can be used for assigning not just functions but functions applied to functions. The cascade operator can be used to declare the functional sequence as a member in an object declaration.
When Falcon fledges as a 1.0 we should have another alternative language which will be worthy of attention.
The documentation thus far is largely PDF's, so a far cry from the excellent live document viewer that comes with Curl, the web content language. Recently I found that I liked the on-line documentation for the processing language at www.processing.org but we may yet see something emerge as a 'live' documentation standard comparable to what Curl offers and Smalltalk could offer.