deliverables/report/ext.tex

   1 \section{Extensions}
   2 \subsection{Higher order functions}
   3
   4 \subsection{Syntactic sugars}
   5 Several small syntactic sugars have been added on several levels of processing
   6 to make writing programs more easy.
   7
   8 \subsubsection{Literal strings}
   9 While there are no literal strings one can print lists of characters. Entering
  10 lists of characters can be cumbersome and therefore a shorthand notation is
  11 added to define literal strings using double quotes. During the lexing phase
  12 the string is lexed as a single token and during parsing the token is
  13 transformed to a equal character list representation. The following example
  14 shows the syntax before transformation and the syntax after. Note that just as
  15 in characters, literal strings can contain escape characters.
  16
  17 \begin{SPLCode}
  18 //Before transformation
  19 var a = "Hello world!";
  20 //After transformation
  21 var a = 'H':'e':'l':'l':'o':' ':'w':'o':'r':'l':'d':'!':[]
  22 \end{SPLCode}
  23
  24 \subsubsection{Anonymous functions}
  25 %TODO
  26
  27 \subsubsection{Variable arguments printing}
  28 To ease the programmer we have included a parse-level transformation that
  29 transforms \SI{print} with multiple arguments to multiple \SI{print} function
  30 calls with a single argument. The following example shows the syntax before the
  31 transformation and the syntax after the transformation.
  32
  33 \begin{SPLCode}
  34 //Before transformation
  35 print("abc", 42, 'c', "da\n");
  36
  37 //After transformation
  38 print('a':'b':'c':[]);
  39 print(42);
  40 print('c');
  41 print('d':'a':'\n':[]);
  42 \end{SPLCode}