Values
Values in Effekt are terms that are pure in the sense that they cannot have any side-effecting behavior. This includes
the usual String, Bool, Int, Double and Char literals, including unicode literals, but also user-custom data types, which we will be presented in a separate chapter.
val pi = 3.14
val int = 42 * 2
val bool = true && false
val str = "hello" ++ ", " ++ "world"
val c = 'c'
val unicode = \u039E // Ξ
Most values of built-in types can be printed with println, however, println is not defined for others, e.g., Char or user-defined data types.
println(str)
It is common to define a show function that renders a value as a string and then print this value:
println(show(bool))
These show functions are predefined for many types in the standard library.
For quick introspection of arbitrary types, the standard library also provides an inspect function that works on arbitrary values (only available for certain backends). This outputs a pretty-printed version of a compiler-internal representation and is not meant to be used for actual “production” code.
inspect(unicode)