I wrote a paper on REBOL back in college. It is very interesting, but the syntax is definitely weird. You might think of the function call syntax as being sort of Forth-like, but with the tokens in reverse order. So like a Lisp, but without required parentheses. e.g. in the example
send [email protected] read http://www.cnn.com
`read` knows that it takes one argument, and `send` knows that it takes two, so this ends up being grouped like
(send [email protected] (read http://www.cnn.com))
(which I think is valid syntax; that AST node is called a 'paren').
Weirdly, the language also has some infix operators, which seem a bit out-of-place to me. I have no idea how the 'parser'[1] works.
[1] 'parsing' happens so late that it feels funny to call it that. The thing that knows how to treat an array as a representation of an evaluatable expression and evaluate it.
Weirdly, the language also has some infix operators, which seem a bit out-of-place to me. I have no idea how the 'parser'[1] works.
[1] 'parsing' happens so late that it feels funny to call it that. The thing that knows how to treat an array as a representation of an evaluatable expression and evaluate it.