.. _tutorial_chapter:

============================
Larch Tutorial
============================

At its core, Larch is a language for processing of scientific data.  This
chapter describes the Larch language and introduces data processing using
Larch.  An important goal of Larch is to make writing and modifying data
analysis scripts as simple as possible.

Although aimed at the novice programmer, this tutorial does make a few
assumptions about the readers experience with scientific programming.  For
example, the reader is expected to have a technical background and some
familiarity with using scientific data analysis programs.  Some
understanding of the concepts of how scientific data is stored on computers
and of the basics of programming will greatly help the reader.

The Larch language is implemented in Python, and heavily based upon it.
Knowledge of Python will greatly simplify learning Larch, and vice versa.
This shared syntax is intentional, so that as you learn Larch, you will
also be learning Python, which can be used to extend Larch.  Alternatively,
knowledge of Python will make Larch easy to learn.  For further details on
Python, including tutorials, see the Python documentation at
http://python.org/

Contents:

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   start
   datatypes
   arrays
   flow
   errors
   procedures
   modules
   builtins
