My posts on this blog have dried up in recent months (about a half of a year) due to a couple rabbit holes that I've gone down. Playgrounds for syntaxes that have never been. I toyed around with a language formed entirely with HTML-like tags (a fairly-unexplored space in PL design) and then had some nostalgia for transpiler languages of yore. Around that time, I had a new idea taking hold...

Just moments ago, I came upon a possible alternative route that I can take in the syntax. This route would lead to a schism in one area and a new unification in another. Perhaps the piece left alone is better that way. The two unified, well, that's a whole 'nother story...

As another exercise, I am going to be translating the 100 doors rosetta code example written in Standard ML.

At long last, a clean design for all data representations in Quarrel has been reached. The design caused some major changes and has effectively winnowed down Quarrel to a place where there is enough abstraction to be comfortable in the available syntax that you can make with the characters on most people's keyboards.

Using this blog entry as a jotpad for an idea I am exploring. With the newly-minted, unified invocation syntax [], I now have two postcircumfix operators that are essentially untied to any semantics. I had a thought wherein the syntax of someContainer(...) could be best spent strengthening the semantic meaning of the parentheses in the first place: as a sequence expression.

It's been some time since Quarrel has called me back to it. I wish I had the foresight to capture what insightful thing returned my mind's eye to gaze upon it's many jagged edges. I did return to reading about the Syndicate concurrency model but I don't recall what led me back to that material. Inspiration aside, I've been able to add some additional content which I will heretofor describe unto thee.

I've taken some time over these last couple of days to continue to add more details here and also read some other language websites for inspiration into the best approach to organizing this site. Reading other language sites has also provided some help in filling out the features that Quarrel provides in its standard library. Keeping an ever vigilant eye for things that could be integrated directly into the language proper.

My first mission is to bring the basic syntax.qvr file found in the qlc repo and transcribe it into Markdown whilst also adding additional details. Here in, lies some details of that journey including a Docusaurus migration and a new syntax highlighting plugin.

I've decided it's time to start getting Quarrel out there in the world. It may not be loved by everyone due to its many alien syntax and new semantics. However, I think it's got something special that the world needs to see. Only time will tell.

In the mean time, I will continue toiling away at this mess of syntax. There are always little shifts that occur which I will document here and what reasoning went into them. Currently, the language is mostly hashed-out however as I expand the documentation, I am finding things that can be tweaked to be more intuitive or to simplify/reduce down what is extraneous and thus provide more operators that are available for future growth of the language. One thing is for sure, when you restrict your design to only just the most commonly-found-on-keyboards symbols, you run out of material real quick!

I will also delve into details about the vision of Quarrel and why I set out on this journey. Feel free to stick around for PL design diatribes and more! Thanks for checking out Quarrel!