Some symbols like "." and "?" play special roles that others, such as "a" and "B" do not.

Other symbols, like a space " " can be repeated without     changing the meaning.

Certain symbols are not allowed in English, such as, "ø", and certain sequences of symbols are not allowed, such as "szzx qqbb".

But English has an escape clause to deal with this: anything inside double quotes does not have to follow the rules of English and should be taken as is.

Valid English with non-English symbols and words:

        In Norwegian "øst" means east, while in Martian "szzx" means west. 

In the sentence the non-English components are put inside quotes. Of course, valid English can go inside quotes as well.

A proper English sentence must have a subject and a predicate. These can be very complicated sequences of symbols or just two words, but grammatically they are equivalent despite differences in the number of letters or how abstract the verb is.

On the other hand, spaces are not important everywhere in Ox, typically when special symbols are involved. main ( ) is the same as main() because the spaces are usually needed to separate things called identifiers, such as decl and x. Identifiers cannot have special symbols in them, so in main() the identifier is main and is followed by special symbols (). But declx; is a single identifier followed by ;, whereas decl x; are two separate identifiers next to each other followed by ;.

In some languages like Python indentation (spaces at the start of the line) and new lines are important parts of the syntax, but not in Ox.

Every Ox program has a single main() procedure.

Without finding a main procedure, Ox code will not do anything.

Some parts of Ox code "happens" when the program runs. Other parts of the code help set things up before the program runs.

The first thing inside main() is the first thing that really happens when ExOx is carrying out the to-do list.

Things that appear above main() in the program do not happen before it.

A well-written Ox program includes comments to make it easier for a human to understand but are completely ignored by ExOx.

Identifiers in Ox look like words, and like English words they are separated by spaces and special symbols.

Because computer languages are supposed to be somewhat understandable by humans, special symbols often play roles in the language that are similar to their uses in human languages.

Some of these syntax rules are easy to learn and intuitive, but others are harder to keep in mind. But even the simplest rules you already know are easy to forget when writing a program. Humans do not think like computers, and their languages are not the same as computer languages, so we often fail to follow basic syntax rules when writing programs

main() {
  x = 5;
  }

main() {
  decl x;
  x = 5;
  }

01a-hello-world.ox
 1:    #include "oxstd.h"
 2:    main() {
 3:    	println("hello world ");
 4:    	}

Following the C programming language, the symbol # in Ox signals a "pre-compilation directive." What that means is that ExOx will process items that start with # on its first pass (or scan) of the program.

These pre-processing directives are not requests to do something in the same sense that x = 5; asks that the number 5 be assigned to a variable named x. In hello world the #include directive tells Ox to find the file named oxstd.h and insert its contents here as if the programmer had typed them. This happens on the first pass through the program. On the second pass #include ... has been replaced by the contents of the included file.

The use of #include and a similar more complicated #import directive is very useful for writing computer programs that are reliable and easy to read. In the case above, the effect is to tell ExOx to make available to this program all the standard routines in the Ox language. Because hello world refers to print() it must be declared before it is used in the program.