I'm making an engineering language where just about everything is an expression. Lately the most interesting thing to me is the juxtapose operator, i.e. if you stick two expressions next to each other without whitespace, they are considered juxtaposed. Initially juxtapose was just going to be for math/multiplication, but I've also decided to make function calling handled via juxtapose as well (since it lets me get rid of several types of syntax and replace them with pure expression handling)
Some interesting examples:
-
since the quotes delimit the string, you don't need the parenthesis
printl'Hello, World!'
-
though sometimes you need to disambiguate with parenthesis
s = "Hello, World!" printl(s)
-
technically you can wrap either operand, so long as they touch
(printl)s // though this is bad style for function calls
-
this has a neat consequence that string prefixes are just functions, and work pretty seamlessly
mypath = p"this/is/some/path/object" myregex = re"[^i*&2@]" myphonetics = ipa"ɛt vɔkavit dɛus aɾidam tɛɾam kɔngɾɛgatsiɔnɛskwɛ"
p
,re
, andipa
are all just ordinary functions -
some basic math examples
x = 3 y = 2x z = (2+3y)(x*2)
-
complex numbers/quaternions are pretty seamless
1 + 2i 1 + 2i + 3j + 4k
-
also physical units will be first class citizens, and fit in pretty nicely with juxtapose
15kg 7(kg) * 10(m/s/s) 25(N/m^2) + 15(Pa) 1500(W) / 10(A) 5(A) * 2(Ω) 8(m*s^-1) / 2(s) 40(N*m) * 10(rad) 1000(m^3) * 2(kg/m^3)
-
Where it gets really wacky/hard to parse is something like this
sin(x)^2 + cos(x)^2 // => (sin(x))^2 + (cos(x))^2
depending on the types of
sin
andcos
different things can happen. By defaultsin
/cos
are functions, so the function call happens first, but if the user redefined them or constructed an identically formatted expression where they are numeric, then the exponent should happen firsts = 10 c = 20 s(x)^2 + c(x)^2 // => s(x^2) + c(x^2)
but that's all just a problem for the compiler
Been working on and off on an interpreter/compiler written in python. Pretty slow going though.