Arrays

SuperForth arrays are all linear and one dimension, although multidimensional arrays can still be achieved with arrays of arrays and so forth. Note: There is one important caveat about arrays: While primitives and even procedures are passed by value, arrays are passed by reference. To be more specific, their pointers are. That means that you can modified an argument-passed array's elements, but not the array itself.

Array Allocation

Arrays and their elements are all stored on the heap (via dynamic allocation), while variables, constants, and generally, primitives are stored on the "stack". The following examples demonstrates the usage of the new keyword to allocate a new array:

int n = 7;
array<int> a = new int[20];
auto b = new bool[n];

The keyword new must be followed by a type specifier (read more about types here) and by a integer value specifying length encapsulated in brackets. Note: Reading an uninitialized (or unset) value from an array will invoke the runtime error ERROR_READ_UNINIT.

Array Literals

Array literals are quite akin to normal array allocations, however the size and elements are predetermined. It is impossible to incur an ERROR_READ_UNINIT via array literals. Here are a few examples:

array<int> a = [1,2,3,4,5,6,2];
array<bool> b = [true, true, false];

String Literals

String literals, data encapsulated in quotation marks, are ultimately array literals of characters. They get translated into array<char>.