[squeak-dev] Ni - a strange little language

H. Hirzel hannes.hirzel at gmail.com
Fri Sep 18 11:19:21 UTC 2015


Some of the comments on theregister might need some attention.

Here some of my questions:

a) I wonder how Ni is related to Nim  http://nim-lang.org/?

b) The Ni article mentinons OrderedCollections and Dictionaries ---
where can I find an example which demonstrates how they are used?

c) Is there a JSON reader and writer for OrderedCollections and Dictionaries?

d) What kind of string operations does it support?

e) The Ni to Nim translator is fairly short.

     e1) How would a Ni to Smalltalk translator look like? (LOC estimate)
     e2) Or a Smalltalk to Ni translator (LOC estimate)?


f) Could Ni be an alternative for plug-in writing of Smalltalk?

g) What about speed of compiled Ni / Nim code?

--Hannes

On 9/18/15, Peter Crowther <peter at ozzard.org> wrote:
> Congratulations, you made the main headline on The Register as I type this.
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/we_are_the_knights_who_code_ni/
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Peter
>
> On 16 September 2015 at 12:58, Göran Krampe <goran at krampe.se> wrote:
>
>> Hi guys!
>>
>> Just wanted to give a pointer to a little language I am implementing:
>>
>> http://goran.krampe.se/2015/09/16/ni-a-strange-little-language/
>>
>> Is it a new Smalltalk-80? No.
>> Is it Smalltalkish? Yes. But still quite different. :)
>>
>> The article tries to introduce some of the funkier aspects of Ni. In
>> essence Ni is a homoiconic dynamically typed garbage collected 100% live
>> language similar to Lisp/Rebol/Forth in its simplicity.
>>
>> But it also has Smalltalk keyword syntax, Smalltalk non local return,
>> blocks-as-closures as in Smalltalk and well, perhaps a few more odds and
>> ends similar to Smalltalk.
>>
>> And one of the next steps is adding objects to it. This will be based on
>> a
>> model of cloning and delegation and an object, so a bit closer to Self
>> there.
>>
>> Why would you want to look at it? Because it breaks (or will break) a few
>> barriers that most Smalltalks still suffer from... easy integration with
>> C/C++, multithreading, embeddability and so on.
>>
>> Hope you find it interesting!
>>
>> regards, Göran
>>
>> PS. Fast? Nope. I mean, its decent for an AST interpreter but I haven't
>> spent time optimizing it yet - it uses dynamically allocated things and
>> methods (dynamic dispatch) quite heavily today.
>>
>>
>


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