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Comment by SkeuomorphicBee | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone else is unfamiliar with Zig syntax and wondering: in Zig the .{ "somevalue"} represents an anonymous list literal [1], and .{.somename = "somevalue"} is an anonymous struct literal [2].

(A bit off topic rant, but Zig documentation is quite bad, it took me a lot more effort that it should to discover the facts above.)

[1] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Anonymous-List-Lit...

[2] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Anonymous-Struct-L...

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I thought the docs were quite good.

I used "ziglearn" to understand ("chapter 1" and "chapter 2" have tons of foundational stuff): https://ziglearn.org/chapter-1/

I used the language reference for the details: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Introduction

I agree the standard library docs aren't useful (unless something changed a lot in the last six months)... it seemed always better to just search and read the standard library source directly.

> I agree the standard library docs aren't useful (unless something changed a lot in the last six months)... it seemed always better to just search and read the standard library source directly.

They're automatically generated. As I understand it they've been holding off on improving them until they have the self hosted compiler working, as it will be easier at that point.

To be fair it's really hard to "search" for tuples and anyonymous structs and get an understanding from "reading the stdlib". It's also enough of a departure from C (but not obviously readable like types on the left) to warrant some sort of big red flag in the lang docs... Understanding this tripped me up a bit

Zig is still not 1.0. I can forgive its lack of docs at this point, especially how surprisingly readable the std lib is.

I'm not wild about the new trend of languages of making a bunch of syntax dependent on a single small sigil. It gives me a strong feeling of Perl's historical "eclecticness" and I feel like I'm putting more effort into correctly reading the program back into my mind than I should ideally have to.

I'm wondering what the point of the period is here, could it be done without it?

I don't know why, but this is a part of the language's syntax, for example when matching a union type each named variant also has that period. Same with the argument for print statements (`print("{s}", .{var})`).

aha, seems like they use the list argument to print instead of having varargs functions then?

I think it allows the parser to be context-free since otherwise it is tricky to distinguish it from a code block. They could have picked a different sigil, but I think . was landed on because it had the fewest semantic conflicts with other concepts in the language (for example % is used to denote modular arithmetic)

In zig code blocks are expressions and can appear in a lot of places, e.g. on the RHS of an assignment. Probably possible to not need the dot but considerably more complicated.

Is `.{"somevalue"}` a string array of length 1?

The dot seems quite superfluous and quite the silly quirk (in an unintuitive way). How do Python and Go get by without such a mystery sigil?

It's a tuple of length one with an array of u8. A tuple is an anonymous struct with special fields that are numerical, note that also tuples can be accessed by index syntax. Some distinction from empty braces is necessary because "naked" empty braces are for code blocks. It's only unintuitive to you because it's different and you're not used to it yet.

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