✦The opening statement

Every script must start with:

bongSlanhOun <expression>;

If the first token in the file isn't bongSlanhOun, nothing runs — the scanner/parser reject the file outright (na `bongSlanhOun`?!!!, exit 65). The expression itself is ceremonial: it's parsed but never checked or evaluated. Additional bongSlanhOuns later in the file are ignored. Only a top-level script needs one — the built-in stdlib modules (vector, math, random) don't.

✦Comments

Line comments only, // to end of line — no block comments:

// this line is ignored
akthe x = 5; // so is this part

✦Literals

• Numbers — one generic token (TOKEN_NUMBER) for both integers and decimals; 5 and 5.0 are scanned identically. The scanner doesn't distinguish LekKut / LekThom / LekThomKlang lexically — a numeric literal is untyped until the type checker pins it down from context (see types.md), the same way integer literals are polymorphic in Rust or Swift until inference resolves them.
• Strings — double-quoted, run to the next unescaped ". There is no escape-sequence processing (no \n, \", etc.) — the scanner just scans to the closing quote, so a literal newline inside the quotes is a multi-line string:

  akthe multi = "two
  lines";
  

  An unterminated string is a scan error.
• Booleans — ok (true) / ort (false), not true/false.
• Nil — sone.

✦Punctuation

Unchanged from Swift/C-family convention: { } for blocks, -> for return types, : for type annotations, [ ] for arrays, ? for optionals. These are symbols, not keywords, so they're never transliterated.

Compound assignment (+= -= *= /=) is supported; there is no ++/--.

✦Keywords

Every keyword is a Khmer transliteration, carried over from steavscript. The scanner recognizes these as reserved identifiers (see include/frontend/token.h):

✦Types as identifiers

Base types aren't keywords — they're ordinary identifiers the type checker resolves specially (see types.md):

Vec2 / Vec3 / Vec4 (from yok vector;) also keep their English names, since they're stdlib-defined sampoans, not language primitives with reserved keywords.