Can you explain how that works? Unless Dark is a purely visual programming language (in which case I'd say that there is "syntax", it's just a bit more abstract, and in any case, it seems that visual languages haven't really caught up as an idea), I find that hard to believe.
The main idea is that you when you make a change (let's say, you type a key in the editor), that change happens directly on the AST (the internal set of objects that represent the program). So for example, if you're seeing:
let x = 5
x + 2
In a normal programming environment, you type up text, and the parser converts it to the internal representation. With Dark, we always keep everything in the internal representation. That means, if it isn't a "syntactically" valid program, you can't create it in the first place.
In practice, this means that if you type, for example, `z` in the middle of `let`, in a traditional language you'd get an error like `lzet is not a valid token` and in Dark, the `z` just wouldn't appear (nothing would happen). So it's not possible to get a syntactically invalid program.
The overall idea with Dark is that programs are always live (and also safe). So to make that be true, we need to ensure that you don't spend a period of time in a state where we can't understand your program (such as when the syntax is invalid).
let x = 5
"hi " ++ name
DB::set{}
Are you saying these lines from the video are not consistent throughout? Like in one part I'll type "x = 5" to assign 5 to x, but somewhere else I'll have to type "5 # x" to do the same? Like just random syntax everywhere?
If not, then you have a grammar. You should document it and treat it as such.
To get to the root of the issue though, there is not a parser.
Well, one could consider the function that takes each keystroke to be a parser - though I don't know if that's technically correct either. So perhaps the more accurate thing to say is there is not a step that takes a textual source file and parses it.
We've looked at allowing people to paste text (eg from Stackoverflow) into Dark. We think we can do it by just inserting each character one at a time (though there's a technical flaw with that at the moment, which could be addressed). In that sense, Dark is sort-of a parser (I don't know if it technically counts).
It's an interesting idea. I don't know if it would work for me, though. I don't write code as a stepwise refinement of a valid program, I massage the text gradually into a valid program. This is especially true when refactoring.
People generally use what we call "trace-driven development", where they make a HTTP request to the code they're editing (typically, people are making APIs or backends to JS apps), and then they always have "live values" of what they're working on (similar to a REPL, or to running unit tests on a loop, but instantly).