APe will strive to be easy to learn by providing the following: (1) Uniformity, or consistancy with itself. (2) Lots of excelent reference material on line for free. (3) Lots of good sample source code will also make it easy to learn. (4) Similarity with other existing popular laguages (so long as we can maintain uniformity within). (5) Easy to read for newbies. Without any training on how to use the lanugage, we want casual on-looker (with only basic knowledge of programming concepts) to be able to read any block of APe code and be able to describe correctly what it is doing.
APe will offer the ablity to compile stand alone executables, in other words, it will require no runtime (in and of itself) it will also stay lightweight by providing libs to pick and choose from the way C works - only include the libraries that you choose to include - thus keeping the resulting binaries as small as reasonaby possible.
Also, to keep things small, APe will allow functions to be tagged as potentially not used, and so when you compile for full release, it can check and see if a those functions ever get called and if not - remove them from the resulting executable.
Provide for inline Assembly, and the ablitly to do things the way they are done in C. But also, aim to get as much done per line as you can in scripting languages.
By placing the APe syntax in the public domain, we ensure that noone can take it and run away with it and leave everyone else with nothing. We want to keep Open Design, Open Specification, Open Source Compiler(s), Open Source Libs, Open Documentation. Not only Open - but also FREE.