Quickstart guide

A program written in Pine is composed of functions and variables. Functions contain instructions that describe required calculations and variables that save the values used in the process of those calculations. The source code line should not start with spaces (there is an exception, see syntax of a multiline function).

A script should contain a study function which specifies the script name and some other script properties. Script body contains functions and variables necessary to calculate the result which will be rendered as a chart with a plot (or some other function that produces the output) function call.

Example of an indicator in Pine

As a first example, we’ll examine the implementation of the MACD indicator:

Line 1: //@version=3

It is a comment with a special directive that sets the version of Pine Script language to 3.

Line 2: study("MACD")

Sets the name of the indicator — “MACD”.

Line 3: fast = 12, slow = 26

Defines two integer variables, fast and slow.

Line 4: fastMA = ema(close, fast)

Defines the variable fastMA, containing the result of the EMA calculation (Exponential Moving Average) with the length equal to fast (12) on close series (closing prices of bars).

Line 5: slowMA = ema(close, slow)

Defines the variable slowMA, containing the result of the EMA calculation with the length equal to slow (26) from close.

Line 6: macd = fastMA - slowMA

Defines the variable macd, which is being calculated as a difference between two EMAs with different length inputs.

Line 7: signal = sma(macd, 9)

Defines the variable signal, calculated as a smooth value of the variable macd by the SMA algorithm (Simple Moving Average) with length equal to 9.

Line 8: plot(macd, color=blue)

Calls the plot function, which would draw a chart based on the Calls the plot function, which would draw a chart based on the values saved in the variable macd (the color of the line is blue).

Line 9: plot(signal, color=orange)

Calls the plot function, which would draw a chart based on the Calls the plot function, which would draw a chart for the variable signal with an orange color.

After adding the indicator “MACD” to the chart we would see the following:

Pine contains a variety of built-in functions for the most popular algorithms (SMA, EMA, WMA, etc.) as well as making it possible to create your custom functions. You can find a description of all available built-in functions here. In the following sections the document will describe in full all the Pine Script capabilities.