Hello, world

A program is a list of instructions for the computer. Tradition holds that the first program in a new language prints a greeting. Here it is in Zaka:

// The rest of a line after "//" is a comment for people. The computer skips it.

// Print the text inside the quotes.
"မင်္ဂလာပါ ကမ္ဘာကြီး" ဟု ပြသပါ။

မင်္ဂလာပါ ကမ္ဘာကြီး

The line reads as a Burmese sentence: "Hello, world" — thus, please show. Each part has a job:

Zaka	Reads as	Job
"မင်္ဂလာပါ ကမ္ဘာကြီး"	"Hello, world"	the text to print, in double quotes
ဟု	"so" (quoting)	marks the words before it as a quote
ပြသပါ	"please show"	the command: print a line
။	full stop	ends the sentence

Each Zaka statement ends with ။, the Burmese full stop. A line break does not end a statement; ။ alone does.

Running it

1. Open the Zaka Explorer, paste the program, and press Run. Or:

2. Save the program as hello.zaka and run it with the compiler:

   zakac run hello.zaka
   

More than one line

A program runs from top to bottom, one statement after another. A program can also print numbers, and it can do sums before it prints them.

"မင်္ဂလာပါ ကမ္ဘာကြီး" ဟု ပြသပါ။
"စံကား ဘာသာစကားမှ ကြိုဆိုပါသည်" ဟု ပြသပါ။   // "Welcome to the Zaka language"
၂၀၂၆ ကို ပြသပါ။                            // a number: show 2026
၆ * ၇ ကို ပြသပါ။                            // a sum: show 6 times 7

မင်္ဂလာပါ ကမ္ဘာကြီး
စံကား ဘာသာစကားမှ ကြိုဆိုပါသည်
၂၀၂၆
၄၂

Text in quotes takes ဟု; a number takes ကို ("show this"). The page on printing explains the difference.

Forgetting the full stop

If a statement has no ။, the program does not run. The compiler stops and reports what it expected:

"မင်္ဂလာပါ" ဟု ပြသပါ

error[ZK0201]: expected "။", found end of input

Each message has a code such as ZK0201. The error messages page lists the common ones.

Hands on

• Change the greeting so that it greets a friend instead of the world.
• Add a line that prints ၁၀၀ + ၂၃.
• Put two statements on the same line. Does it still run?

Next: Comments.