Previously, there was a single parsing rule for "bare words" that
applied to both internal and external commands.
This meant that, because `cargo +nightly` needed to work, we needed to
add `+` as a valid character in bare words.
The number of characters continued to grow, and the situation was
becoming untenable. The current strategy would eventually eat up all
syntax and make it impossible to add syntax like `@foo` to internal
commands.
This patch significantly restricts bare words and introduces a new token
type (`ExternalWord`). An `ExternalWord` expands to an error in the
internal syntax, but expands to a bare word in the external syntax.
`ExternalWords` are highlighted in grey in the shell.
At the moment the pipeline parser does not enforce
that there must be a pipe between each part of the pipeline,
which can lead to confusing behaviour or misleading errors.
This commit migrates Value's numeric types to BigInt and BigDecimal. The
basic idea is that overflow errors aren't great in a shell environment,
and not really necessary.
The main immediate consequence is that new errors can occur when
serializing Nu values to other formats. You can see this in changes to
the various serialization formats (JSON, TOML, etc.). There's a new
`CoerceInto` trait that uses the `ToPrimitive` trait from `num_traits`
to attempt to coerce a `BigNum` or `BigDecimal` into a target type, and
produces a `RangeError` (kind of `ShellError`) if the coercion fails.
Another possible future consequence is that certain performance-critical
numeric operations might be too slow. If that happens, we can introduce
specialized numeric types to help improve the performance of those
situations, based on the real-world experience.
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 commit is more substantial than it looks: there was basically no
real support for decimals before, and that impacted values all the way
through.
I also made Size contain a decimal instead of an integer (`1.6kb` is a
reasonable thing to type), which impacted a bunch of code.
The biggest impact of this commit is that it creates many more possible
ways for valid nu types to fail to serialize as toml, json, etc. which
typically can't support the full range of Decimal (or Bigint, which I
also think we should support). This commit makes to-toml fallible, and a
similar effort is necessary for the rest of the serializations.
We also need to figure out how to clearly communicate to users what has
happened, but failing to serialize to toml seems clearly superior to me
than weird errors in basic math operations.
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.
This commit makes it possible to force nu to treat a command as an external command by prefixing it with `^`. For example `^dir` will force `dir` to run an external command, even if `dir` is also a registered nu command.
This ensures that users don't need to leave nu just because we happened to use a command they need.
This commit adds a new token type for external commands, which, among other things, makes it pretty straight forward to syntax highlight external commands uniquely, and generally to treat them as special.
