About rat:

rat has syntax that looks like C, but with all the joys of dynamic typing and first class functions.

Comments in rat start with # and continue to the end of the line
$ is unused by rat, and instead will be used throughout this ReadMe to indicate something a rat programmer would change within their program

To declare a function, use
def funcName($parameters) {
    $functionBody
}
or, create a variable and set it equal to a lambda.

the function's return value will be the last thing evaluated.
In fact, all blocks result in the last thing they evaluate, so take advantage of that as you will.

Variables are declared with the syntax
var varname = $expression;

Lambdas have the syntax
lambda ($parameters) { $lambdaBody; }

To iterate, rat provides a while loop
while ($condition) {
    $loopBody
}

Conditionals are in the form of 
if ($condition) {
    $body
}

and can be followed by an else in the form of
else {
    $body
}

All blocks can either be multiple statements within curly braces, or a single statement, meaning that for all of the above (funcdefs, lambdas, whiles, if's, and else's), if the body is only a single statement, the braces may be omitted.

Objects are available in the form of environments
The current environment can be retrieved with the keyword "this", and any variable within an object can be assigned or retrieved with the dot operator, for example
object.x
The dot operator may be chained if objects contain other objects as in
root.left.parent

Arrays can be created with the array() function that accepts a single number as an argument, which is the size of the array.
Arrays are zero based, and accessing a value less than zero or greater than or equal to the size of the array will cause an error.
Elements of an array can be accessed with the syntax
$array[$index]

String literals are wrapped in quotes, can be multiline, and have special escaped characters \n, \\, and \" to allow for newlines, backslashes, and double quotes, respectively.

String literals and integers can be printed to the console with the variadic function squeek, which returns the value of its last argument.
squeekln operates identically, except for also printing a new line after it finished printing all of its arguments.

Arguments to functions can be delayed by prepending the argument with an @.

The mathematical operators of +, -, *, /, and ^ are available and work as expected, but do not respect order of operations. To ensure correct order of operations, use parentheses. - acts as both subtraction, and unary negation.

The boolean opererations of !, &, and | are logical not, logical and, and logical or. & and | short circuit.

Comparison operators are available in <, >, <=, >=, and ==. These can compare numbers, or strings in alphabetical order.

Parenthesized expressions are important for ensuring order of operations, but are also the only way to immediately call a lambda, function returned from a function, or access deeper levels of arrays without intermediate variables. For example
(lambda () $lambdaBody)();
($array[$row])[$col];