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Comment by maryrosecook | Hacker News Reader

Hi, Mary here. I wrote Isla.

Just FYI, the Clojure version of the language is deprecated. For the last year, I have just been working on the JavaScript version:

https://github.com/maryrosecook/isla

My latest work has been on a programming environment and programming demos:

http://islalanguage.org/

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Very interesting language!

Why are numbers quoted? It seems that many of the quotes could be optional (except when needed for parser disambiguation). From your examples:

  age is 1
  name is Mary
  friend is isla

You could also use '.' as an optional command delimiter (in addition to newline) for more prose like, such as:

  age is 1. name is Mary. friend is isla.

I like the period idea. I will try it.

Quotes are required around number literals to maintain consistency with string literals.

I'm partial to the advice to designate strings by the vertical bar instead of quotes. eg, write |Hello | input_name |. Nice to meet you|. This avoids the complication of escape formats until much later.

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