This commit contains two improvements:
- Support for a Range syntax (and a corresponding Range value)
- Work towards a signature syntax
Implementing the Range syntax resulted in cleaning up how operators in
the core syntax works. There are now two kinds of infix operators
- tight operators (`.` and `..`)
- loose operators
Tight operators may not be interspersed (`$it.left..$it.right` is a
syntax error). Loose operators require whitespace on both sides of the
operator, and can be arbitrarily interspersed. Precedence is left to
right in the core syntax.
Note that delimited syntax (like `( ... )` or `[ ... ]`) is a single
token node in the core syntax. A single token node can be parsed from
beginning to end in a context-free manner.
The rule for `.` is `<token node>.<member>`. The rule for `..` is
`<token node>..<token node>`.
Loose operators all have the same syntactic rule: `<token
node><space><loose op><space><token node>`.
The second aspect of this pull request is the beginning of support for a
signature syntax. Before implementing signatures, a necessary
prerequisite is for the core syntax to support multi-line programs.
That work establishes a few things:
- `;` and newlines are handled in the core grammar, and both count as
"separators"
- line comments begin with `#` and continue until the end of the line
In this commit, multi-token productions in the core grammar can use
separators interchangably with spaces. However, I think we will
ultimately want a different rule preventing separators from occurring
before an infix operator, so that the end of a line is always
unambiguous. This would avoid gratuitous differences between modules and
repl usage.
We already effectively have this rule, because otherwise `x<newline> |
y` would be a single pipeline, but of course that wouldn't work.
This commit extracts five new crates:
- nu-source, which contains the core source-code handling logic in Nu,
including Text, Span, and also the pretty.rs-based debug logic
- nu-parser, which is the parser and expander logic
- nu-protocol, which is the bulk of the types and basic conveniences
used by plugins
- nu-errors, which contains ShellError, ParseError and error handling
conveniences
- nu-textview, which is the textview plugin extracted into a crate
One of the major consequences of this refactor is that it's no longer
possible to `impl X for Spanned<Y>` outside of the `nu-source` crate, so
a lot of types became more concrete (Value became a concrete type
instead of Spanned<Value>, for example).
This also turned a number of inherent methods in the main nu crate into
plain functions (impl Value {} became a bunch of functions in the
`value` namespace in `crate::data::value`).
This commit extracts Tag, Span, Text, as well as source-related debug
facilities into a new crate called nu_source.
This change is much bigger than one might have expected because the
previous code relied heavily on implementing inherent methods on
`Tagged<T>` and `Spanned<T>`, which is no longer possible.
As a result, this change creates more concrete types instead of using
`Tagged<T>`. One notable example: Tagged<Value> became Value, and Value
became UntaggedValue.
This change clarifies the intent of the code in many places, but it does
make it a big change.
The original purpose of this PR was to modernize the external parser to
use the new Shape system.
This commit does include some of that change, but a more important
aspect of this change is an improvement to the expansion trace.
Previous commit 6a7c00ea adding trace infrastructure to the syntax coloring
feature. This commit adds tracing to the expander.
The bulk of that work, in addition to the tree builder logic, was an
overhaul of the formatter traits to make them more general purpose, and
more structured.
Some highlights:
- `ToDebug` was split into two traits (`ToDebug` and `DebugFormat`)
because implementations needed to become objects, but a convenience
method on `ToDebug` didn't qualify
- `DebugFormat`'s `fmt_debug` method now takes a `DebugFormatter` rather
than a standard formatter, and `DebugFormatter` has a new (but still
limited) facility for structured formatting.
- Implementations of `ExpandSyntax` need to produce output that
implements `DebugFormat`.
Unlike the highlighter changes, these changes are fairly focused in the
trace output, so these changes aren't behind a flag.
* Moves off of draining between filters. Instead, the sink will pull on the stream, and will drain element-wise. This moves the whole stream to being lazy.
* Adds ctrl-c support and connects it into some of the key points where we pull on the stream. If a ctrl-c is detect, we immediately halt pulling on the stream and return to the prompt.
* Moves away from having a SourceMap where anchor locations are stored. Now AnchorLocation is kept directly in the Tag.
* To make this possible, split tag and span. Span is largely used in the parser and is copyable. Tag is now no longer copyable.
The main thrust of this (very large) commit is an overhaul of the
expansion system.
The parsing pipeline is:
- Lightly parse the source file for atoms, basic delimiters and pipeline
structure into a token tree
- Expand the token tree into a HIR (high-level intermediate
representation) based upon the baseline syntax rules for expressions
and the syntactic shape of commands.
Somewhat non-traditionally, nu doesn't have an AST at all. It goes
directly from the token tree, which doesn't represent many important
distinctions (like the difference between `hello` and `5KB`) directly
into a high-level representation that doesn't have a direct
correspondence to the source code.
At a high level, nu commands work like macros, in the sense that the
syntactic shape of the invocation of a command depends on the
definition of a command.
However, commands do not have the ability to perform unrestricted
expansions of the token tree. Instead, they describe their arguments in
terms of syntactic shapes, and the expander expands the token tree into
HIR based upon that definition.
For example, the `where` command says that it takes a block as its first
required argument, and the description of the block syntactic shape
expands the syntax `cpu > 10` into HIR that represents
`{ $it.cpu > 10 }`.
This commit overhauls that system so that the syntactic shapes are
described in terms of a few new traits (`ExpandSyntax` and
`ExpandExpression` are the primary ones) that are more composable than
the previous system.
The first big win of this new system is the addition of the `ColumnPath`
shape, which looks like `cpu."max ghz"` or `package.version`.
Previously, while a variable path could look like `$it.cpu."max ghz"`,
the tail of a variable path could not be easily reused in other
contexts. Now, that tail is its own syntactic shape, and it can be used
as part of a command's signature.
This cleans up commands like `inc`, `add` and `edit` as well as
shorthand blocks, which can now look like `| where cpu."max ghz" > 10`
with the `help` command to explore and list all commands available.
Enter will also try to see if the location to be entered is an existing
Nu command, if it is it will let you inspect the command under `help`.
This provides baseline needed so we can iterate on it.
This ended up being a bit of a yak shave. The basic idea in this commit is to
expand `~` in paths, but only in paths.
The way this is accomplished is by doing the expansion inside of the code that
parses literal syntax for `SyntaxType::Path`.
As a quick refresher: every command is entitled to expand its arguments in a
custom way. While this could in theory be used for general-purpose macros,
today the expansion facility is limited to syntactic hints.
For example, the syntax `where cpu > 0` expands under the hood to
`where { $it.cpu > 0 }`. This happens because the first argument to `where`
is defined as a `SyntaxType::Block`, and the parser coerces binary expressions
whose left-hand-side looks like a member into a block when the command is
expecting one.
This is mildly more magical than what most programming languages would do,
but we believe that it makes sense to allow commands to fine-tune the syntax
because of the domain nushell is in (command-line shells).
The syntactic expansions supported by this facility are relatively limited.
For example, we don't allow `$it` to become a bare word, simply because the
command asks for a string in the relevant position. That would quickly
become more confusing than it's worth.
This PR adds a new `SyntaxType` rule: `SyntaxType::Path`. When a command
declares a parameter as a `SyntaxType::Path`, string literals and bare
words passed as an argument to that parameter are processed using the
path expansion rules. Right now, that only means that `~` is expanded into
the home directory, but additional rules are possible in the future.
By restricting this expansion to a syntactic expansion when passed as an
argument to a command expecting a path, we avoid making `~` a generally
reserved character. This will also allow us to give good tab completion
for paths with `~` characters in them when a command is expecting a path.
In order to accomplish the above, this commit changes the parsing functions
to take a `Context` instead of just a `CommandRegistry`. From the perspective
of macro expansion, you can think of the `CommandRegistry` as a dictionary
of in-scope macros, and the `Context` as the compile-time state used in
expansion. This could gain additional functionality over time as we find
more uses for the expansion system.
Remove a number of unwraps. In some cases, a `?` just worked as is. I also made it possible to use `?` to go from Result<OutputStream, ShellError> to OutputStream. Finally, started updating PerItemCommand to be able to use the signature deserialization logic, which substantially reduces unwraps.
This is still in-progress work, but tests pass and it should be clear to merge and keep iterating on master.
