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Comment by kubb | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a language tour, otherwise I don't know what this is.

This is quite strange. It seems they are hiding the syntax on purpose, you need to dig into the documentation until you see a code example.

I'd ascribe it to ineptitude rather than malice. Either way, expecting first-time visitors to be patient and understanding enough to go looking for syntax/EBNF unaided is a mistake.

The docs themselves are weirdly written:

> The session begins with an assignment of the string ‘hello’ to the variable A. A is the variable; gets is the assign action; the string ‘hello’ ( a list of characters) is the expression.

The most egregious part about this rambling mess is that "gets" is not in the example.

It appears in later examples on the same page. I suspect that := was added as syntactic sugar but docs were not updated.

It is awesome on the quirkyness-o-meter that they (if I'm right) started with "gets" (which to me does not feel assignment-like) then sugared it into := which is very common, yet kept the name.

The GitHub README gives more context for the somewhat inconsistent state of the docs. It's an open source release of a language that had been a commercial spinoff from academia decades earlier, and now gets only occasional updates from two people as a spare-time project:

> The Nial language was developed by Mike Jenkins and Trenchard More in a collaborative research project supported by Queen's University at Kingston and IBM Cambridge Scientific Center from 1979 to 1982.

> [...]

> Nial Systems limited licensed the interpreter from Queen's University and marketed it widely. Mike Jenkins continued to refine both the language and its implementation. In 2006 Mike released Version 6.3 as an open source project to encourage continued development of Nial.

> In 2014 Mike started working with John Gibbons to develop a 64-bit version and to add capabilities that John needed for his work. The decision was made to target the open source for Unix-based platforms and release it on GitHub.

There's a Documentation link at the top of the page [1]. I think Nial Introduction [2] is what you'd like to read first.

[1] https://www.nial-array-language.org/ndocs/

[2] https://www.nial-array-language.org/ndocs/intro/index.html

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