Introducing agora: a dynamic, embeddable programming language built with Go (opens in new tab)

That's fine, I know it can't please everyone, but as mentioned in the docs and the article, this is more about Lua-like semantics with a syntax very close to Go than Java. There are no exceptions per se, there are runtime errors returned to the Go host, and a protected mode using `recover()`.

The preamble before `if` is mainly because the variables are function-scoped anyway, but again, a lot of things may change, this is the very first step in a long iteration process, and the feedback I'm getting today from the various forums will help a lot in knowing how to steer the ship.

What I would want in such a language is (in formal set-theoretic terms) a strict superset of Go. I would want something would run code that would also be compiled by the Go compiler, but which would also run programs that omitted type declarations. (Hence, the set of strings that are valid programs is larger than for Go, and also includes all valid Go programs.)

Such a language could be used as a REPL and dynamic debugging environment for Go. That would be utterly fantastic.

Most of the differences are actually Lua-like semantics, which is perfectly in line with the author's goal of making a "Lua for Go". I suspect that v0.2 will branch out from there a little.

Personally, though, if I wanted a Lua for Go, I'd just use Lua (or maybe LuaJIT).

BTW, thanks also for creating 'gocrawl'. We've been trying it out a little bit, it is working good so far!

Go's floating point support is sort of FUBAR. For example, these three equivalent snippets all produce different results:

1. fmt.Printf("%f", 1.0 / -0.0);

2. x := -0.0; fmt.Printf("%f", 1.0 / x);

3. x := 0.0; fmt.Printf("%f", 1.0 / -x);