\chapter{Introduction}

\lama is a programming language developed by JetBrains Research for education purposes. Its general characteristics are:

\begin{itemize}
\item procedural with first-class functions~--- functions can be passed as arguments, placed in data structures,
  returned and constructed at runtime via closures mechanism;
\item with lexical static scoping;
\item strict~--- all arguments of function application are evaluated before function body;
\item imperative~--- variables can be re-assigned, function calls can have side effects;
\item untyped~--- no static type checking is performed;
\item with S-expressions and pattern-matching;
\item with user-defined infix operators, including those defined in local scopes;
\item with automatic memory management (garbage collection).
\end{itemize}

The name \lama is an acronym for $\lambda\textsc{-Algol}$ since the language has borrowed the syntactic shape of
operators from \textsc{Algol-68}; \textsc{Haskell}~\cite{haskell} and \textsc{OCaml}~\cite{ocaml} can be
mentioned as other languages of inspiration.

%\input{01.01.general_characteristics}
%\input{01.02.notation}
%\input{01.03.values}