(HN has indentation, though.)
It’s important to realize that this is good design. It’s hard to separate yourself from the time you live in, but the rewards are worthwhile.
There's a big difference between "code being in one file" and "code being in one function." It sounds like the OP had something reasonably close to "one function," whereas the HN code has a lot of (what appear to be) small well designed methods.
(def add1 (x|int)
(+ x 1))
I've been implementing it for a couple years now, though not seriously till the past couple months. There are some interesting (and overlooked) ideas in Bel.
Bel is sort of the limit case of generality. For example, you might expect the "type" above to be a separate kind of object, the way that types are separate kinds of things in TypeScript.
But in fact, it's simply a function that receives the argument and can throw an error. So for example, you can do something like:
(def positive (x)
(if (< x 0) (err 'negative) x))
(def sqrt (x|positive)
...)
[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-reference/Experimental_Featu...
Which IDE do you like? I'll see about getting some highlighting for it.
As for actually running arc, it’s hard to run the original arc3.1 due to racket updates. I’ve made a few branches over the years that try to preserve the original spirit of arc (no significant changes) while making it easy to run. Try this one:
https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc
I believe you can simply install racket, then run make && bin/arc and be dropped into a repl. From there you can follow the arc tutorial, whose link I’ll dig up after I’m finished driving home.
EDIT: That fork is actually a lot different from arc3.1 proper. I’ll try to locate a more faithful one.
EDIT 2: Unfortunately it's quite a lot of work to remove the mzscheme dependency from the old arc3.1 codebase. And I'm not sure it's even possible to install the mzscheme lib on the latest racket (e.g. `brew install racket` doesn't seem to have it).
So the above instructions are the best I can do for now.
I like how the "html" and "css" part was embedded in that "news.arc" file. Do you think that VIM script will highlight and lint the "css" part of an "arc" file?
I try to use Arc for as much as possible. We wrote our TPU monitoring software in it: http://tensorfork.com/tpus
Eventually I became frustrated with Racket's FFI. So I eventually made my own arclike language called elflang: https://github.com/elflang/elf
... which itself is a fork of Lumen (https://github.com/sctb/lumen) by Scott Bell.
The performance is good enough to run a minecraft-style game engine: https://i.imgur.com/iyr0YrB.png which was satisfying.
Nowadays I've been trying to implement Bel, mostly for the challenge of it than for any practical reason.
> I like how the "html" and "css" part was embedded in that "news.arc" file. Do you think that VIM script will highlight and lint the "css" part of an "arc" file?
Nope. https://i.imgur.com/o9aUG6j.png
But it has one very important feature: it can properly highlight atstrings: https://i.imgur.com/wO4f742.png
It's probably hard to tell, but the "@(hexrep border-color*)" would normally be highlighted as if it were a string. Arc has a feature called atstrings, where you can use @foo to reference the enclosing variable "foo". It can also call functions, e.g. "The value of 1 plus 2 is @(+ 1 2)" will become "The value of 1 plus 2 is 3".