TIL: Tcl-inspired command language on top of D

Now make a TIL/Tk and I'm sold!

Yeah, that's on the plans. I want to migrate my own projects.

People expect whitespace to be either 'indifferent' or 'significant'.

Indifferent is the default: it means you only need whitespace when tokens would otherwise parse wrong, like `symbol1234` vs. `symbol 1234`. Also, you can add as much as you want, the parser doesn't care.

Significant means that whitespace is semantic, meaningful. This almost always means depth of indentation, although I've encountered other semantic whitespaces in the wild.

Sometimes lining things up just looks nicer. Here's an example of how I like to construct a literal Lua table:

    local colors = { black  =  0x000000, 
                     white  =  0xffffff,
                     red    =  0xff0000,
                     blue   =  0x0000ff,
                     green  =  0x00ff00, }

Lots of whitespace! Two spaces on either side of the longest equals, for the longest symbol, and left-alignment on the keys.

I don't like this nearly so much:

    local colors = { black = 0x000000, 
                     white = 0xffffff,
                     red = 0xff0000,
                     blue = 0x0000ff,
                     green = 0x00ff00, }

The hex values are all over the place, it makes it harder to read them and see the pattern. Consider a collection of binary flags as another example where you really want the right column to line up.

You could choose to right-align the left column, so that the equals are in the same place and the right column lines up, but why should you? Then you miss the semantic indentation. They're columns, I want to column align them.

I support no tabs, though :D we share religion on that one.

After C and DasBetterC (safer C) have officially become the subsets of D language [1], it will be very interesting what languages will be the de-facto superset of D. With excellent support for metaprogramming and CTFE in D (amongst other features), these supersets language can be very flexible and fast at the same time.

Kudos to the TIL's author for trailblazing this idea based on TCL. It will be very beneficial and handy for scripting commands and shell like behaviors. Just wondering is this type based TCL like language similar to Little? [2] Will it eventually support compilation similar to Emacs Lisp? [3]

Personally I'd love to have superset language in D for data science. It should be also easily embeddable and support prototyping like Lua. On top of that it should have excellent support for array, ndarray and dataframe like R [4]. Since it is based on D, then it can fulfil the the requirements for both type A and B data scientists [5].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27102584

[2]https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Little

[3]https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02504

[4]http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Data-structures.html

[5]https://www.quora.com/What-is-data-science/answer/Michael-Ho...

Wow... you picked up just the right example. I mean, hex values are just a perfect scenario - was that simple integer values I probably would disagree (I don't like the possibility of messing with diffs in the case some variable receives a big name, for instance).

Now I'm thinking about math, also. The assignment with "=" is not a thing on Tcl-like languages in general, but maybe some "formulas" would benefit from more spacing, like

  set x    1 +    2 +    3
  set y 1000 + 2000 + 3000

(or something like that. YMMV)

Okay. I'm changing that as soon as I can. Thank you very much.