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`
If possible matches are not found then check if the passed in `obj`
parameter is a `string` or a `path`, if so then return it. I am not
sure this is the right fix, but I figured I would make an attempt and
get a conversation started about it.
When the last command has an input value larger than the data its
operating on it would crash. Added a check to ensure there are enough
elements to take.
Bare words now represent literal file names, and globs are a different
syntax shape called "Pattern". This allows commands like `cp` to ask for
a pattern as a source and a literal file as a target.
This also means that attempting to pass a glob to a command that expects
a literal path will produce an error.
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.
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.
