Exploring Programming Languages — MoonScript

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Let’s continue our exploration of programming languages with a new, interesting one: MoonScript.

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MoonScript is a relatively new language, as it’s only 13 years old. It was first published in 2013.

I think I heard about MoonScript a few years back, but never really paid attention to it.

Fun fact: MoonScript is a CoffeeScript-inspired language that compiles to Lua.

Ok, let’s jump into our main topic, which is creating an LED Numbers application.

The application should work like this: we input 1977, and it returns:

LED Numbers output

Now, keep in mind that we want to show this to newcomers to MoonScript, not to seasoned developers.

The first thing we’re going to do is create a Table (Dictionary) that holds lists (Similar to a Map in other languages) to hold all the components of the LED numbers:

leds = {"0": {" _  ","| | ","|_| "},
        "1": {"  ","| ","| "},
        "2": {" _  "," _| ","|_  "},
        "3": {"_  ","_| ","_| "},
        "4": {"…