Goals

Enu is meant for anyone who wants to explore, experiment, or make games, but particular care has been taken to make it usable by children However, rather than bypassing the keyboard with a Scratch-like visual programming language, Enu attempts to reduce and simplify the keystrokes required for a text-based language, while (hopefully) preserving most of the flexibility text-based code offers.

With this in mind, Enu tries to:

• Reduce nesting. Indentation can be tricky for new programmers.

• Reduce the use of the shift key. Lower case is used almost everywhere. Commands are written to avoid underscores and parenthesis. Optionally, Enu can be configured to interpret a ; keypress as :, as : is used frequently in Nim (and requires shift, at least on US English keyboards) while ; is not.

• Omit or shorten identifier names. me instead of self/this. - instead of proc. 5.times: or 5.x: instead of for i in 0..5:. Single letter shortcuts for many common commands.

• Pretends to avoid types. Enu code is Nim code and is statically typed, but types are inferred or auto-converted where possible. Types are great, but are confusing for new programmers.

• Spatial organization. No files. Code is text, but it's accessed through an object in the virtual world.

• Avoids events. Tries to make all flow based on loops and conditionals.