What is TON618
TON618 is a small interpreted language, similar in spirit to how Python or HolyC work: you write a .ton file, run it directly with the ton618 interpreter, and it executes immediately — no separate compilation step for your scripts.
The interpreter itself (ton618) is written in C++17 and ships as a single, dependency-free binary. It's cross-compiled for Linux, Termux (Android), and Windows (see Installing & building), and auto-detects which of those it's running on at startup.
The language's defining feature is the ton. prefix: declaring a variable or a function always uses it (ton.int x = 5, ton.function f() { ... }). Once something is declared, though, referring to it again — reading it, reassigning it, or naming a function parameter — can use either ton.name or the bare name; both resolve to the same thing. This documentation uses ton. everywhere for clarity, except for short-lived names like loop counters and function parameters, matching the style already used throughout exemples/. See Language basics for exactly where the prefix is required versus optional.
Since beta-2.0.0 it is also an object-oriented, expression-friendly language: classes with inheritance, method syntax on every value ("hi".upper(), nums.filter(...).map(...)), arrow functions, f-strings, ranges and slices, destructuring, the pipe operator |>, an interactive REPL, helpful error messages with tracebacks — and an interpreter about 6x faster than 1.x. See Classes & objects and the Changelog.
TON618 supports error handling (try/catch/throw), a dictionary type (ton.dict), for ... in and C-style for loops, a switch/case statement, a format() helper for building strings without a chain of +, compound assignment (+=, -=, ...), increment/decrement (++, --), a ternary operator (cond ? a : b), function expressions (anonymous callbacks), and a fairly large standard library covering math, strings, arrays, dicts, files, JSON, regular expressions, and base64/hex/URL encoding — see the Changelog for the full history.