Recently Implemented Syntax Extensions

The alert reader must have noticed that in my recent post I refer to a syntax extension called LeftList, intended to model left-associative lists, which are naturally showing up in many contexts.

But that's not all, I've been busy adding more goodness. After realizing that the frontend for expressions of the form ()u and (42)i was already present, I decided to add these as Unit and Item syntactic extensions. I documented them in the manual, so the next release will be up-to-date documentation-wise.

Today, being given some idle time, I came around to finish up the LeftRecord extension, which is just what you would expect. Implementing it turned out to be even easier than the same process performed for LeftList, not only because of the lessons learned, but for want of the ambiguous parsing of {tail; tag=val}lr which does happen with LeftLists: [tail; head]ll.

There is one itch left: adding LeftPairs, which should be a piece of cake, and could happen anytime. And then there is a pie-in-the-sky enhancement request (a.k.a. issue 64), which is somewhat tricky, so do not expect it being done any day now.