ABS preview-2: your favorite scripting language just got a major boost

These days I got some spare time to work on the 2nd preview release of ABS, with loads of interesting features making into this version.

Let me quickly run you through the most notable additions:

Array destructuring

Similar to JS’ destructuring, you can now assign multiple variables based on the elements of an array:

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[x, y, z] = [1, 2]
x # 1
y # 2
z # null

The line before a destructuring statement needs to end with a ;, but we’ll fix the parser:

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# This will not work
# as the parser sees `x = "10"[a]`
x = "10"
[a] = [100]

# This is ok
x = "10";
[a] = [100]

Standard input

My personal favorite, you can now capture stdin with the (surprise) stdin() function. An asciicast is better than words:

Note that you can loop through the stdin as well:

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for x in stdin {
    # Do stuff with x...
}

Floats

Weird that I didn’t look into this earlier :)

Floats are now fully supported, and integers have been replaced with the generic “number”, wich represents both integers and floats:

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1 + 1 # 2
1.2 + 1 # 2.1
type(1) # NUMBER
type(1.1) # NUMBER

You can also “convert” a float to integer using int():

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1.5.int() # 1

Compound assignments & additional operators

These aren’t crazy, but weren’t there in the first preview of ABS:

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>=
<=
%
<=>
+=
-=
*=
/=
**=
%=

Nothing much to explain here, I’m sure you’re familiar with these. Note that I opted to keep ++ and -- out of the picture for now as the complexity of implementing those is, in my opinion, not worth it since you can simply x+=1.

What now?

Grab the latest release for your platform, dump it in your path and start hacking with ABS!

If you’re brave enough, just:

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

(you might need to sudo right before that)

Cheers!