Let's break backwards compatibility!

[SheepTester]

N shall crawl into a cave (releasing only 0.x versions) until it is more finalised and ready, then it shall emerge as N 2.0; how exciting!

Discuss some ideas for improving N here!

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

Here are some things to discuss!

• Syntax Improvements
• Function Improvements
• Language Library Mappings
• Preformance Improvoments
• Built-in types
• Mutability
• Syntax Consistency

Let me know if you want more added!

[SheepTester]

What syntax improvements

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

#258 (comment)

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

Syntax Improvements Thread:

[SheepTester]

Well json.object is just the constructor function; you can do

let whatever = json.object

if let <object weee> = whatever(...) {

And for user-defined types you can import them like

let { object } = imp "./json.n"

I think it's less verbose to be able to do <object ...> instead of <json.object ...> and it also works for non-native modules

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

The main problem with doing <object ...> instead of <json.object ...> can be a problem when two imported files have a similarly named enum, this also goes for enum constant names too.

[SheepTester]

It's not a problem because the type is known at type checking time

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

But it is syntactically ambiguous and it is slightly confusing. Also, how would this work?

let a = imp "./test.n" // Contains an enum value called `test`
let b = imp "./test1.n" // Contains an enum value called `test`
print(test) // How does this work

[SheepTester]

The object in if let <object ...> = is not an expression; you can't just put any value in there, it has to be an identifier.

In your example, test is not defined

It's like how .a is both used to access a field from { a: str; c: int } but also { b: bool; a: int }.

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

Typescript features to adopt maybe

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

Ideas:

• Union Types
• Nullish access
• Nullish type casting
• maybe typed record fields being optional
• Better type constricting (If a maybe is evaluated to not none then cast it to its regular type)
• Interfaces
• Type mappings from java modules to N

[SheepTester]

• Union Types
• Nullish access
• Nullish type casting

We already have these

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

Nullish access does not exist for records or classes
Where did we implement Nullish type casting and Union Types

[SheepTester]

The yes function casts a type to the nullish type (maybe)

You can use custom types (enums) as union types

Ah, I was thinking of the a[b] operator

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

Fixing json because it is really hard to use jsons in N rn

[SheepTester]

I was working on a JSON parsing library that would've made it very nice to parse and create JSON

[Ashvin-Ranjan]

Can you finish it because v1.3.0 came out and we can use it as a basis for v2

[SheepTester]

I believe it required comprehensive match expressions like

match (result) {
  <ok value> => ...,
  <err error> => ...,
}

or whatever the syntax is

I'm just waiting on the JS branch to finish first