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Sigils

The toolchain is named sigil because Silicon uses a handfull of special characters to add special meaning. Sigils are not operators. They don't do anything other than distinguish the type of identifier or expression. Sigil only come before an identifier (prepended).

There are four sigil characters: @,$, & and \. They also have different semantics when doubled.

  • @ keywords.
  • @@ annotations / macros

  • $ atoms OR environment variable.

  • $$ named parameters.

  • & function/block evaluation.

  • && compile time function/block evaluation.

  • \ infix function call

 if true, 'yes';

  @fn fib 1 = 1;
  @fn fib 2 = 2;

  @@memo
  @fn fib n = {
    (&fib n - 1) + (&fib n - 2);
  };

  @type bool = $true \or $false;

Misc

  • _ alone indicated a discard value or implicit value.

Unused Operators / Symbols

Silicon leave 10 12 Special characters left unused. They MAY be defined according to the specification. If these are defined by an implemenation, they MUST be either binary infix operators or sigils.

~ ` " ! % ^ | ^ % ? < >

< and > are unused since they're used in markup languages such as HTML and XML; builtin functions and methods can be used instead, which incidently are more readable.

&below age, 5 same as age.below 5

&if age.below 5 $then 5.00 $else 10.00

keywords are all caps? Make it like SQL + PYTHON

IF childs_age IS BELOW 7 years_old
THEN charge 5.00 dollars 
ELSE charge 10.00 dollars

C like

const int years_old = 1;
if (childs_age < 7 * years_old){
  charge(5.00, Currency.DOLLARS);
}else{
  charge(10.00, Currency.DOLLARS);
}