Runes are the fundamental operators/functions in the Hoon programming language, and the building blocks of Hoon expressions. Runes are digraphs made of two ASCII special characters, for example :-, !<, ^-, ?:, .^, etc. Most runes take a fixed number of arguments (usually 1-4), or else an arbitrary number of arguments terminated with ==. Runes are organized into 11 main families by their first character, so for example the :-family forms cells, and has variations like :-,:_, :~, :^, etc, to create different kinds of cells. Runes are composed together to create complex expressions.
Further Reading
- Hoon School: Our guide to learning the Hoon programming language.
- “Hoon Syntax”: A Hoon School lesson that explains runes.
- The Rune reference: A comprehensive catalogue of the different runes and how to use them.