Variables

Variables defined in functions are allocated on the stack.

int x = 7;
string str = "Hello";

Amethyst is a statically-typed programming language. Primitives include the following:

• byte
• short
• int
• long
• float
• double
• bool
• string
• nbt

The NBT compound type nbt type acts like object in other programming languages. Almost all types inherit from it and thus can be assigned to it.

tip

See the appendix for more information on built-in types.

With optimizations disabled, all variables are placed on the stack which is a location in NBT storage (amethyst:runtime stack). When optimizations are enabled, some integer related variables will be assigned to scores instead.

Currently, all variables are mutable.

References

Variables can be referenced, which creates a pointer to them. There are two main types of references, strong and weak. Unlike other languages, they don't just differentiate in the way they affect garbage collection. Traditional pointers are numbers that point to a location in memory. Pointers in Amethyst are NBT path strings that point to any NBT location.

For example, a pointer to a player's health could be represented as entity @p Health. Those who are familiar with Minecraft commands may recognize this as /data command syntax. Amethyst internally uses macros to put these pointers directly into /data and /execute. The operators ^ and & can be applied to types for weak and strong references, respectively.

tip

See the handbook for how references work.