Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#1

Post by andybak » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 8:46 AM UTC

Nim 0.13.0 has been released
nim-lang.org

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#2

Post by SeanDav » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

I will definitely be keeping an eye on Nim. That aside, does anyone else find the fact that Nim treats "-1" differently to "- 1" (quotes added for clarity) a bit disconcerting?

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#3

Post by adrusi » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 2:36 PM UTC

SeanDav wrote: post #2

I will definitely be keeping an eye on Nim. That aside, does anyone else find the fact that Nim treats "-1" differently to "- 1" (quotes added for clarity) a bit disconcerting?

That depends on how good the error messages are. I can't see it being a common problem, but if there was a typo, I can imagine it being quite hard to find without an error message clearly indicating.

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#4

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 3:03 PM UTC

SeanDav wrote: post #2

I will definitely be keeping an eye on Nim. That aside, does anyone else find the fact that Nim treats "-1" differently to "- 1" (quotes added for clarity) a bit disconcerting?

Negative literals/negation/subtraction sharing "-" leads to odd corner cases in the grammars of quite a few languages. I'm rather fond of the J approach: -1 is the application of the negation operator to the literal one. _1 is the literal negative one. This is a very important distinction in J since you can have whitespace-delimited lists of numbers. "-1 2 3" is equivalent to "_1 _2 _3".

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#5

Post by jboy » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

For anyone who's interested in learning more about Nim, here is Andreas Rumpf (the creator of Nim)'s talk at the OSCON 2015 conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rJEBs_Nnaw ; and here's a longer, more-technical talk at the first Nim Workshop in November 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb3Sqs7lNJo

Here's the official Nim tutorial: http://nim-lang.org/docs/tut1.html

And here is the very approachable "Nim by Example", which offers a series of short, simple lessons about the main Nim features: https://nim-by-example.github.io/

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#6

Post by klibertp » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

SeanDav wrote: post #2

I will definitely be keeping an eye on Nim. That aside, does anyone else find the fact that Nim treats "-1" differently to "- 1" (quotes added for clarity) a bit disconcerting?

In Lisps, this:

    (- 1)

and this:

    (-1)

Are completely different things (the latter is actually an error). Also in LiveScript

    ls> (- 2)
    [Function]
    ls> (-2)
    -2

Also in Smalltalk, this:

    -3. "=> -1"
    - 3. "=> Error!!!"

That's off the top of my head, I'm sure there are many other languages with this characteristic. Why would that be a problem? It's just a single (or a couple) parse rules to remember (but you get other benefits from it).

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#7

Post by dom96 » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 3:47 PM UTC

jboy wrote: post #5

For anyone who's interested in learning more about Nim, here is Andreas Rumpf (the creator of Nim)'s talk at the OSCON 2015 conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rJEBs_Nnaw ; and here's a longer, more-technical talk at the first Nim Workshop in November 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb3Sqs7lNJo Here's the official Nim tutorial: http://nim-lang.org/docs/tut1.html And here is the very approachable "Nim b…

Great links! Also be sure to get in touch with us if you get stuck. We're usually pretty active on IRC [1] and the Nim Forum [2], but feel free to also ask questions on Twitter [3], StackOverflow [4] or Reddit [5].

1 - http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=nim

2 - http://forum.nim-lang.org/

3 - http://twitter.com/nim_lang

4 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/nim

5 - http://reddit.com/r/nim

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#8

Post by desireco42 » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 4:11 PM UTC

This is really great little language. I really enjoy using it and executables I get from it can be very small which brings smile to my face.

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#9

Post by KirinDave » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 4:12 PM UTC

Nim's approach to parallelism is, for the general industry, basically groundbreaking and inspiring work.

I really wish that this language got more attention. It can fill many of the same holes that Go fills without all the awkward dependency non-management and bad error handling. Similar story for Rust, it's got a lot of similar benefits without an ownership and extent model many people find confusing.

Re: Nim 0.13.0 has been released

#10

Post by elcapitan » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

I used to play around with it when it was still call "Nimrod" and it was quite good fun. It's easy to learn and the examples were good. A c like language that has a python like syntax was something I had hoped for for some time.