Comment by djedr | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by djedr | Hacker News Reader

This is one thing I designed Jevko[0][1] for.

If you have an idea for a format or a language and would like to quickly start hacking on the layer above the syntax, Jevko is an option.

It's meant to be even simpler and hackable than S-expressions.

It gets you from a string to a tree in the least amount of steps.

See here[2] if interested.

Happy hacking!

[0] https://jevko.org/ [1] https://djedr.github.io/posts/jevko-2022-02-22.html [2] https://gist.github.com/djedr/151241f1a9a5bc627059dd9b23fc74...

With the square brackets it has a bit of a Rebol feel to it. Was that intentional or coincidental?

I suppose a bit of both.

I was more directly inspired by Lisps, but I do prefer the original M-expressions and the syntactic choices that REBOL and Red make.

I think placing the operator before the opening bracket better emphasizes its special significance and can reduce nesting for constructs like `f[x][y]` (vs. `((f x) y)` in Lisps). Square brackets somehow seem more aesthetically pleasing to me. And there is a practical reason to prefer them, especially if your syntax uses only one kind of brackets -- square brackets are the easiest to type on an average keyboard.

So REBOL-like syntax is nicer. As were M-expressions. They probably didn't catch on, because they were not minimal enough, compared to S-expressions. And maybe because S-expressions were fully implemented first.

Nice project. Thank you for sharing.

Thanks! :)

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