Sjoerd Visscher's weblog

My ideas about new web technology that can change the future of the world wide web.

< Monday, December 16, 2002 >

The friendlier Loell

Since the last Loell update, the language has become a lot more user friendly. Precedence and unary operators are implemented, so arithmetic formulas now work as expected. The ; expression separator is now optional at the end of a line. Extra indentation on new lines prevents the insertion of a separator. Lists are now built-in. The list syntax uses the ; expression separator too, which is also optional at the end of a line. Lists have support for Ruby-like collect, in the form of two methods: all and some. The difference is in the handling of failures:

[1; 'a'; 3] all {that*2} // --> failure
[1; 'a'; 3] some {that*2} // --> [2; 6]

Another new feature is an 'else' for closures, which together with the (runtime) assertions gives a clean syntax, similar to Haskell's guards.

Number.sign = {this gt 0;  1}
            | {this lt 0; -1}
            | 0