Mongoose syntax

As a brief followup to my last post, here's the entire Mongoose language syntax. It's not in a single paragraph for clarity, but it's still quite concise.

Literals

• Strings are enclosed in double-quotes. Any double-quotes within the string are escaped with backslash.


• Characters are enclosed in single-quotes. A single-quote must be escaped.


• Integers can be base 10 (42), base 16 (0x2A), or base 2 (0b101010).


• Symbols (used to name messages) begin with a hash mark (#) and can contain any legal message (see below).


• Arrays can contain any sequence of expressions, contained in #( ... ).
  

A normal set of control characters can be used in strings and characters using backslash (\n, \t, \e, etc.), plus Unicode hex escapes (\u002A).

Sending Messages

All messages are sent to a receiver. There are three types of message sends: unary, binary (operator), and keyword.
receiver unaryMessage sends #unaryMessage to receiver.
receiver + argument sends #+ to receiver with an argument (where + can be any sequence of Unicode operator characters)
receiver do: this with: that sends #do:with: to receiver (where this and that are arguments)

Precedence

Unary->Binary->Keyword.
Thus,
4 squared + 2 to: 12 + 8 factorial
is equivalent to
((4 squared) + 2) to: (12 + (8 factorial))
All operators have equal precedence.
Precedence can be overridden using parentheses.

Statements

A statement takes one of three forms: normal, assignment, and return.
A normal statement is simply a message send (which can have message sends as its receiver or arguments, recursively).
An assignment statement consists of a variable, the assignment symbol :=, and a message send, like
foo := bar value.
A return statement consists of the return symbol ^, and a message send, like
^bar value.
Statements are separated by a full stop.

Declaring Variables

Local variables are declared between vertical bars, like this:
| x |
| x. y. z. |
Thanks to a wee bit of context-sensitivity in the parser, | is still available as an operator.

Identifiers

Any non-whitespace, non-punctuation Unicode character (plus the underscore) is legal in an identifier. Identifiers must not start with a digit.

Blocks

A block is a set of statements enclosed in square brackets ( [ ... ] ). Blocks may contain any mix of statements and variable declarations. A block can define arguments, which must appear in a declaration at the start of the block; arguments are indicated with colons, eg
[ | :x | x + 2]

Scoping

Scoping is entirely lexical. There are no global variables. Specifically, scopes at this point nest as follows:
class variables -> method arguments -> method locals > block arguments/locals (-> block arguments/locals...)

Reserved Words

Mongoose has three reserved words. self refers to the object whose method is currently executing. super is an alias for self that starts method lookup at the parent class. Self (capitalized, like a class) is a placeholder for the class of self, whatever it may be (in descendants and the like).

self is not a reserved word per se; it can be bound to any identifier within a method, but the compiler currently enforces self. Self (capitalized) is likely to be renamed, due to the potential for confusion with self.

I'm considering a couple additional literal forms, but that's the entire language at the moment.

For writing classes in text format, there's a declarative format that lays out methods and such, but it's extrasyntactic right now.