Tokay Programming Language (tokay.dev)

It'd be great to add those examples to the homepage! I had to dig a few levels deep to see what the language looked like. Clicking "Getting started" then scrolling all the way to the bottom seems like a lot of work to answer the question of "why should I care about this?".

Other repls often use ctrl-d for end of Input Stream instead. Ctrl-c is rather expected to Interrupt the programme execution, not the repl.

I read all of the documentation that's available on https://tokay.dev/tokay-docs/, but unfortunately it never really... describes itself? Many sections, including the section on "parselets" are just unwritten. "Consumable" values are mentioned but never described (there is a "stub" section that doesn't really explain what the term means).

It begins with a pretty detailed description of value "severity" but doesn't really motivate why the concept exists. (I think that it's (basically) a way to very concisely discard certain matches? When there are "more important" matches around them?)

There are no examples of how I could use Tokay to "parse" something -- there are lots of examples dotted through the docs, but none of them demonstrate working with structured file formats, and they feel a little bit contrived.

I'm not complaining here: this project is not making any false claims about its status, the docs are clearly and explicitly unfinished, it is very clear that Tokay is still under active development.

But I want to learn more about it! I came away from this with a sense that it has the potential to be really useful to me, but without any concrete evidence to support that. I guess the next step is to download the source and start reading through the tests.

All this to say: please highlight some examples showcasing situations where Tokay shines! (Parsing CSVs containing quoted strings was making the rounds recently, right? What does that look like in Tokay?)

Oh, actually, the GitHub readme has an example that is more involved than any in the documentation: https://github.com/tokay-lang/tokay

    _ : [ \t]+                # redefine whitespace to just tab and space

    Factor : @{
        Integer _             # built-in 64-bit signed integer token
        '(' _ Expr ')' _
    }

    Term : @{
        Term '*' _ Factor     $1 * $4
        Term '/' _ Factor     $1 / $4
        Factor
    }

    Expr : @{
        Expr '+' _ Term       $1 + $4
        Expr '-' _ Term       $1 - $4
        Term
    }

    Expr _ print("= " + $1)   # gives some neat result output

It would be really interesting to include many other languages other that JS and this one looks like a great fit (eventually).

If anyone want's to give it spin you can but ONLY SOME FEATURES WORK HERE AND I WILL BREAK THE STUFF YOU DO! IT'S NOT EVEN ALPHA O BETA JUST BEING DEVELOPED. https://texttransform.io/

That said I am interested on HN's point of view of this idea even if very raw, specially people interested in text transformation.

I must conclude that Tokay is too immature to use however. If it wasn't it would clearly display, within one click of the home page, the similarities and differences between awk and tokay, because that's what a developer would care about as opposed to anything else, and that feedback will be consistent so it must be very new.

Good luck, look forward to seeing it again some day.

https://tokay.dev/getting-started/

How does the Tokay executable know that some argument is a string vs. a file?

  # What if I have a file named "save the wales"?
  tokay program.tok -- file.txt
  tokay program.tok -- "save the wales"

  # What if I have a file named '.+'?
  tokay program.tok
  tokay '.+'