Capturing an idea with minimal involvement from the inner editor.
I want to shed light on some syntactic constructs in programming languages that work similarly to affixes.
Decorators, tags, however you call them.
It’s something you prepend to something else, usually to alter the meaning or otherwise change that. Example:
@decorator
fn my_function() ...
That would alter my_function. Another one:
#tag 1234
That would alter the value of 1234. E.g. we could do:
#uint8 123
To tag 123 with a specific data type. Another one:
--- !!set
? red
? green
? blue
!!set – that’s YAML syntax that tags the value that follows as a set.
The important thing about these prefixes is that they end before the value they apply to begins. E.g.:
decorator(fn my_function()...)
could semantically be similar or the same as @decorator but this syntax requires that the value that the decorator is applied to is wrapped in parens. Applying multiple decorators like that would look like:
deco1(deco2(deco3(value)))
Whereas with the prefix syntax it would be:
@deco1 @deco2 @deco3 value
Which is much more pleasant to a human processor.
Same idea can be applied in suffix form:
value | decorator
value_decorator
value |> decorator
The value goes first, then one or more decorators.
This order works better for some expressions.
E.g. units:
100 | characters_per_minute