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Comment by JohnDeHope | Hacker News Reader

I think the syntax and numerous keywords are interesting. They have keywords for every weekday, month, unit of time (singular and plural), etc. Most programming languages are proud of how few keywords they have. This means every last damn little thing you want to say has to be said with an enum, static, constant, etc.

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That sounds quite similar in spirit to Rebol and descendants, which also have built-in datatypes and dedicated syntax for a wide range of things [http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/datatypes.html].

I thought the secret sauce for Rebol was that the syntax is so flexible that you can express things like email addresses etc. as seeming “literals”. I.e. you don’t have to wrap everything in strings (and enums and).

Yes, that’s the approach it takes — having an unusually large range of literal syntax. That’s different to what Perun2 seems to do, but it’s still ‘similar in spirit’ like I said.

I thought the trick with Rebol is that it's "stringly-typed" like Tcl, so you can invent whatever syntax you want because it's all just strings anyway.

No, Rebol is not stringly-typed at all. Quite the opposite — like I said, it relies on having a large range of built-in datatypes.

Thanks for clarifying. Any tips for getting started with it myself? It seems very different from other languages.

I’m only a novice myself, really. Rebol and descendants tend to have little documentation, but poking around the websites [0] [1] should be enough to get started.

[0] http://www.rebol.com/docs.html

[1] https://www.red-lang.org/p/documentation.html

(NB. Red is a descendant of Rebol; they’re not the same, especially with more advanced features, but they’re still similar enough that the documentation transfers over easily.)

I had forgotten about this language. I think the Red language is a descendant.

Brings my thoughts to Visual Basic myself. That's one keyword ridden language! It's funny... The initial learning curve may be smooth in that language "because English" but then you have to remember how all the statements need to be written in exchange.

iirc F# has units of measure too.

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