Viewing profile — markvangulik

As for SHRDLU, it was built atop a “language”, PROGRAMMAR, if I recall, which was really a big ball of Lisp, so the syntax was basically tons of parentheses with keywords inside th…

“Implemented in” is the key. If you want, say, a C compiler written in Lisp, you end up writing a compiler. If you want a Haskell compiler written in Lisp, you write another compil…

I forgot to add the interfaces versus classes, inner classes, and lambda notation, with the tons of trivial FunctionalInterface interfaces to deal with a smattering of the combinat…

Very true. The core Avail language uses “_=_” for comparison, “_:_” to declare a variable, “_:=_” got assignment, and “_::=_” for constants (think “final”). It also has “_:_:=_” fo…

I went into this design decision, having looked very closely at the specific success of the SHRDLU system (1971?). Local disambiguation was very effective, and Avail goes even furt…

Some of the keywords and operators (punctuation) of Avail methods are “completely optional”, in that the caller’s choice to include it or not (or alternative prepositions in some c…

Perhaps. But wouldn’t you prefer that COBOL become a mere dialect of Avail?

Right, and that’s why Avail is nothing like that. Kind of the opposite when it gets down to it... Cheesy, closed languages like C forgot that exponentiation was even a thing, or co…

Well said, that’s exactly right. Most languages lack a bottom type, or screw it up by pretending that “null” fits that role and falsely promises everything that every other type pr…

It’s a big concern, but technically most of the world doesn’t actually use ASCII. We use shortcuts in IntelliJ (and Eclipse before that), so if you want a right arrow, you type “ri…

Working on it, sorry about that. We lost some things when rehosting some time ago and have prioritized other things. There is no mailing list any more.

The core syntax of Avail does have a prose-like feel to it, and that’s intentional. But when you narrow it or extend it for specific linguistic domains (CSV, tensors, business rule…

We’re working on tools for writing/viewing Avail more easily. Stay tuned, it’ll be worth the ride...

Yes, that agrees with the shape of Avail’s type hierarchy. There’s a top type and a bottom type, and the latter has no instances.

Haskell has infinite and recursive constructs, lazily computed. That’s what makes their type system undecidable. Avail is constructivist in that sense, so immutable structures must…

If you wouldn’t mind, please post a screenshot where you think an example is supposed to be displayed but isn’t. Or mail it to “mark” at the same address as the website.

If you grab the development branch, you can use the modular lexers to make that a little bit clearer. If memory serves, “a socket address from and 80” can now be written “192.168.1…

Slow two days now. Lots of internal errors, no new content since Thursday. I guess they won’t ever add decades overdue Unicode support after all, since ad revenue will be zero pret…

At this exact moment, Avail can only evaluate expressions left-to-right, except of course for functions (block expressions, using [] notation resembling Smalltalk). However, I'm cl…

It was intended with humor, of course, but really creating a natural language syntax is a tiny capability of Avail. We're working on the details at the moment, but we're fairly cer…

Unfortunately there's no guide to walk you through the library. However, we have code level documentation in a live searchable form here: https://www.availlang.org/about-avail/docu…

Just to whet your appetite, consider this: Method "_plus_" is [ a : number, b : number | a + b ]:number; Print: 5 plus 6; The entire language is built this way.

I'm one of the authors. If you're concerned that what we built is a mere natural language parsing engine, have a look here: https://www.availlang.org/about-avail/documentation/faq.…