I suppose that you have already gained access to the commands patscc, patsopt and myatscc. If you have not, there are plenty of resources on-line that can guide you through the process of installing ATS (more precisely, ATS2) on your own machine. For instance, you can find various scripts on-line for installing ATS on Linux and MacOS.
Let us go through the few lines of code in Hello.dats quickly. One can form a line-comment in ATS by starting the line with two slashes (//). One can also form a block-comment in ATS by using the ML-style of commenting:
(*
...here-is-a-block-comment...
*)The following lines are for staloading (that is, statically loading) some library code that the ATS compiler (ATS/Postiats) may need for the purpose of compilation:
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload_libats_ML.hats"I will give some explanation elsewhere on using library functions in
the construction of ATS programs. In order to compile a program into
an executable, the special function named main need to be
implemented. In the following code, main0 is a variant of
main:
implement
main0() = println! ("Hello", ", world!")Note that the body of main0 is required to be of the type
void. The function-like println! prints its arguments to
the standard output and then prints a newline at the end. I use the
name function-like to refer to something in ATS that is like a
function but is not actually a function.
There is a Makefile provide for compiling the code. One can also use the following myatscc command-line for compilation:
myatscc Hello.datswhich should generate an executable of the name Hello_dats. By executing Hello_dats, one sees the expected output:
>> ./Hello_dats
<< Hello, world!
Happy programming in ATS!!!