I’m curious about some of the design choices.

Having a period / full stop as the EOL punctuation rather than a semicolon is a nice idea. But personally I think the idea of a line terminator is antiquated.

Using square brackets for strings feels superfluous when you have to quote the strings anyway. Was there a reason for this design?

I don’t like the “stop” keyword either. Is that doing anything special that the ‘.’ punctuation isn’t already doing? If so, that should be clearer.

Using whitespace to reference objects instead of ‘::’, ‘->’ or ‘.’ is also counterintuitive. However at least this is just familiarity issue; at least just so long as tabs and multiple spaces don’t break the method calls. Otherwise you then have an easy way to introduce hard-to-spot bugs.

Iteration syntax is weirdly terse compared to the verbosity of the rest of the language. I’m not saying the syntax is bad, but it feel jarring at first when compared to the design choices of the rest of the language.

On the positive side of things, it’s nice to see someone experimenting with language syntax. There’s definitely aspects I do like there too.

▲ gabordemooij 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I would love to further discuss some syntax issues.

- STOP is from telegraphs. \n is also allowed.

- The assymetric string boundaries (brackets) allow you to embed quotes/boundaries without escaping.

what is terse about the loops?

any further thoughts about EOL?

	▲	hnlmorg 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		1. ‘stop’ reads like a change of execution flow (like ‘continue’, ‘break’, and ‘return’) rather than an ASCII control code. I appreciate you’re taking that from telegraphs but I wonder if you’re better off using the control code name (LF) instead? 2. Interesting. Have you got any examples of this? Every example I’ve seen thus far has been `[‘string constant’]` 3. I might have misunderstood the fizzbuzz example https://xoscript.com/docs.xo?chapter=examples but it looked like the following syntax set up a for-loop as a closure: `{ :i … } * 101` It was a little surprising because usually with languages that lean heavily into English keywords (eg the Pascal/Algol/Basic derivatives) you’d see these control flows use keywords like FOR. Heck, even C-derived languages do too. Now I’m not saying the syntax is bad. In fact part of me rather likes it. But it definitely surprised me. Similarly the IF conditions surprised me with their tenseness. Though i do like their syntax too. Regarding the fizzbuzz example, why do some conditions have TRUE while others do not. Eg `(i = 0) continue.` True appears to be implicit. `(i % 15 = 0) true: { … ), continue.` True here is explicit. Is it because closures require that explicitness?