Shorthand - ideas and background

Shorthand prototype

Basic ideas

• Shorthand is a incomplete-language (lacks loops, recusion, control statements, and lambdas)
• Shorthand is based on the general idea of assigning a value to a label
• Shorthand only has two types of statements - assignments and expansions
  • Assignments exist on a single line in the form of label, operator and value
    • assignments (attaching a value or expansion to a label)
  • If the line is not an assignment it is an expansion written to stdout
    • expansion (is a string with any labels in string resolved to their previously assigned value)
• A assignment statement is a triple (three cells of a tuple)
  • op (the assignment operation to be performed)
  • label (the receiver of the results)
  • value (the thing being operated on)
• In memory it is represented as a five-tuple
  • op
  • label
  • value
  • expansion
  • line number
• An additional map contains an index into the 5-tuple pointing at the most recent assignment associated with that label
  • this allows labels to mutate but the prior version of the label still exists in memory and can be written out to a file
• An expansion is a string with zero or more labels expanded
• By defaut shorthand works on standard in and standard out
  • but the VM in shorthand package contains an Eval for embedding in other projects
• Operators (functions whos results are assigned to labels)
  • begin and end with colons and cannot contain spaces (e.g. “:set:”, :“import-text:”)
  • internal inputs
    • assign a string to a label
    • assign an expansion result to a label
    • assign an expanded result to another expansion
    • assign a markdown processed string to a label
    • assign a expanded markdown processed string to a label
  • external inputs
    • assign the contents of a file to a label
    • assign the expanded contents of a file to a label
    • assign the output of a Bash command to a label
    • expand the command sent to Bash, assign the output to a label
    • assign a markdown processed file to a label
    • assign an expanded markdown processed file to a label
  • special form
    • read a file for assignments nothing is assigned to the label
  • outputs
    • write to a file the expansion for a label
    • write to a file all the expansions for all labels (order not guaranteed)
    • write to a file an assignment statement for a label
    • write to a file all assignment statements (order by parse sequence)
• two factors prevent shorthand from being a full “language”
  • it does not support a control statements (you might be able to synthesize this via Bash)
  • it does not support creation of new operators (though expansion of labels passed to Bash is similar)
• it is not “functional” in the sense that labels are mutable (can take a new value over time)
  • but the prior version to the mutation still exists in the queue of assignments and can be played back by dumping to a file.
• there is only one type - a string
• there are no built in data structures
• there is no comments though you could treat the output to standard out as comments
• shorthand could be expanded to use another interpretive environment but Bash is very convientent
• text is UTF-8
• operators begin and end with a colon
• assignments are a single line (terminated with a )

someday, maybe

• Write a formal definition of Shorthand to encourage other implementations
• Allow additional operators to be defined in other easily go embedded languages
  • JavaScript
  • Lua
  • PHP
  • Scheme (LispEx, GLisp)
• Organize the registration of operators in the code for easy expansion
  • symbol (e.g. :=: )
  • Name
  • Function pointer
• lamda operator
  • if the “label” if the lamba is in the form of a an operator it receives the value expression and then can be used as an Operator itself
• Additional data types
  • stack of strings
  • a queue of strings
  • a map of strings
  • numbers in the lisp sense of numbers (e.g. integers, ratios, decimal)
• Additional built-in operators
  • math
    • add
    • substract (alias to add with second number sign flip)
    • multiply
      • invert sign of number (positive/negative)
    • divide
    • modulo
    • inc by N (positive or negative)
• io
  • support for URI/URL for file operation
  • support CURL like operations
• Add some sort of random text or Lorem Ipsum function for testing and filling in templates
  • Random Text with MarGopher
  • Lorem Ipsum in Golang: Golorem, other version are probably out there too