Strings and Chars

Strings are lists of chars.

Given we have lists, it makes sense to avail ourselves of them to implement strings. So for example:

"Hello," @@ " world!"

and

list.length("hello")

both work, and we get those, and all the other list operations on strings for free.

See Lists for @@ etc.

We use the C convention of single quotes ('a') to delimit chars and double quotes ("hello!") to delimit strings, so

'H' @ "ello"

is how to build strings from chars, and

['H', 'i']

prints as "Hi".

Unicode

The language has basic Unicode support. Unicode characters outside of the ASCII range can be used in variable names and in literal strings and characters. Currently the only supported encoding for input and output is UTF-8. Unicode escape sequences of the form \uxxx; (where xxx is one or more hexadecimal digits) can also be used in strings and characters.

Here's a small example from the tests.

let
    link "listutils.fn" as list;

    Σ = "abc\u03b1;\u03b2;\u03b3;";
    Ψ = "abcαβγ";
    F♮ = "cool";
in
    assert(list.length(Σ) == 6);
    assert(list.length(Ψ) == 6);
    assert(Σ == Ψ);
    assert('\u03b1;' == 'α');
    assert(F♮ == "cool");

Next: Tuples