ABS 1.3.0: interactive shell commands bring more productivity to the language

A couple weeks ago the ABS team managed to pull together a new minor release of the language, 1.3.0. This new release only adds 2 new features, but we believe one of them (interactive commands) is money!

Interactive commands via exec(…)

Interactive commands allow you throw the user into their preferred shell while running an ABS script (even within the ABS repl).

An asciinema is worth a thousand words:

The syntax is very simple: just call the exec function with the command you want to run as the only argument, such as exec("vi /etc/hosts"). IO is left to the user so ABS will not try to meddle with that — it’s all yours!

for…else

We added the ability to specify an else block in a for loop!

This feature is inspired by the jinja template engine and allows to run code when the list you’re iterating over is empty:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

for x in flag("test").split(",").filter(f(e) { e.int() != 1 }) {
    echo(x)
} else {
    echo("No elements provided")
}

# $ abs script.abs --test 1,2,3,4
2
3
4

# $abs script.abs --test 1,1,1,1
No elements provided

Now what?

Install ABS with a simple one-liner:

1

bash <(curl https://www.abs-lang.org/installer.sh)

…and start scripting like it’s 2019!

PS: Again, many thanks to Erich, who’s been taking a larger role as the weeks have gone by — interactive commands were his idea, and he took care of implementing them from A to the Z!

I would also like to thank Ming who already helped ABS with a few contributions in the past, and was responsible for for...else in this release!

See you next time!