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Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

Hey, nice! I have a notes file experimenting with a similar tree-style minimalist data notation; it's definitely an area that needs more exploration.

I like what you've done with it, I'll need to take a closer look.

While I was thinking about it, I also decided to take a look into prior art, which took me all the way back to Landin's "The Next 700 Programming Languages" from 1966 which introduced the hypothetical language ISWIM, which was the first to introduce indentation based syntax and inspired the ML and Haskell family of languages (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf)

It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it's fascinating to see how long we've been thinking about these kinds of issues.

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Yes, and surprisingly there are not too many that use any indentation based syntax (about 1 in 50). However, of the ones that do (abc, aldor, boo, buddyscript, cobra, coffeescript, csl, curry, elixir, f-sharp, genie, haml, haskell, inform, iswim, literate-coffeescript, livescript, madcap-vi, madcap, makefile, markdown, miranda, nemerle, net-format, nim, occam, org, promal, python, restructuredtext, sass, scss, spin, stylus, xl-programming-language, yaml) there are some real gems.

Some more interesting read's in this space:

2003 - Egil Möller's I-expressions - https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html

1984 - Alan Kay's 3-D spreadsheet - http://worrydream.com/refs/Kay%20-%20Computer%20Software%20-...

1972 - Mark Wells' A Review of Two-Dimensional Programming Languages - http://sci-hub.cc/10.1145/942576.807009

Cool! Thanks for some more reading and inspiration.

Here's what I have in my notes buffer; I hadn't gotten much further than this.

  Ssn: /([0-9]{9})|([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4})/\1\2\3/
  People: Table
      first: String
      last: String
      dob: Date
      ssn: SSN

  Csv
      headings: True
      load people.csv
          as: People
      select first last dob
      filter dob.age > 21

Well, I had some discussion, alternate forms of the syntax, links to prior art, etc, but not much else worth sharing.

Will have to add your TreeNotation and Ohayo to that list, as well as these other links you've shared.

Very nice! The nice thing about these kinds of notations is that they last. Simplicity is timeless. I can immediately grok exactly what you are doing here. :)

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