Designing Roto: Implementing Optional Semicolons in a New Scripting Language
By
karakoram
The bagel they save for the regulars. Don't skim, savour.
Summary
The article discusses the author's development of a new scripting language called Roto, which aims to be easy to use and read by making semicolons optional for statement termination. The author explores the technical challenges of implementing automatic semicolon insertion, using Rust as an example to illustrate how programming languages handle statement boundaries without explicit terminators. The content delves into parsing techniques, language design decisions, and the trade-offs involved in creating a language that balances readability with unambiguous syntax.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledI'm making a scripting language called Roto. Like so many programming languages before it, it has the goal of being easy to use and read.
Many languages end up making semicolons to delimit or terminate statements optional to that end. I want that too!
This sounds simple, but how do they implement that? How do they decide where a statement ends without an explicit terminator?
To illustrate the problem, we can take an expression and format it a bit weirdly. We can start with an example in Rust:
In Rust, that is perfectly unambiguous...
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