Novelties in OSH and YSH

Oils usually cleans up existing practice, rather than inventing brand new things. But here are a few features that may be unfamiliar.

Table of Contents

Global Options in the Interpreter

The interpreter has a big list of global settings! Print them with shopt -p.

This idea comes from shell, and they can be tamed with blocks to shopt:

shopt --unset errexit {
  touch /let
  touch /it
  touch /fail
}

We use options to upgrade OSH to YSH:

shopt --set ysh:upgrade

It's a bit like use strict; in Perl and JavaScript, or from __future__ in Python.

The Python-like features in YSH have to co-exist with shell like echo "hello $name", so there are more "first words".

In YSH, mutation looks like this:

setvar x = 42
setvar x += 3

Not like JavaScript or Python

x = 42  # doesn't work
x += 3  # nope

In YSH, you use the call keyword to throw away the result of an expression. It's most often used with functions and methods:

call myFunc(x)

call mylist->pop()

The = operator works the same way, but prints the return value:

$ = mylist->pop()  # pretty-print result with = operator
(Str)    "x"

$ = 42 + a[i]
(Int)    43

Attribute nodes start with capital letters, and this changes the parsing mode to allow "bare" assignment:

hay define Package

Package {
  name = 'cpython'  # assignment without var/setvar keyword
  version = '3.12'
}

These use [] instead of ():

assert [42 === x]  # assert can pretty-print the expression

ls8 | where [size > 10]  # not implemented

It's motivated by idioms from Awk and R.

YSH is Lisp-y! These unevaluated quotation types don't appear in Python and JS:

var myblock = ^(ls /tmp | wc -l)  

var myexpr = ^[age > 10]  # use evalExpr()

var mytemplate = ^"$name is $age years old"  # not implemented

TODO: Explain more.

Generated on Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:04:01 -0500