Nim 2.2.6 | slacker news

Nim has a python-like syntax, but I wish they'd gone farther, using `def` instead of `proc` and a `print` function instead of the `echo` statement. Though even if they did those things, I'm not sure it would really feel like programming Python.

As a long-time Python programmer, I was drawn to trying the language partly because of the syntax, but as soon as I tried to write something substantial, Nim's heritage in languages like Pascal, Modula, and Ada starts to show. Syntax notwithstanding, programming in it really felt more like programming in Pascal/Modula.

I in fact did not know anything about Nim's history or design choices when I started using it, but I'm old enough to have written a fair amount of Pascal, and I was not long into using Nim when I started thinking, "this feels weirdly familiar." `type` and `var` blocks, ordinal types, array indexing with enums, etc.

Actually echo is not a statement - Nim's syntax is just much more flexible than Python so what looks like a statement in Python is actually just a UFCS/Command-Line "call" (of macro/template/generic/procedure aka "routine"). It is super easy to roll your own print function [1] and there is no penalty for doing so except that the std lib does not provide a "common parlance". So, that wheel might get reinvented a lot.

A lot of things like this in cligen because it is a leaf dependency (the literally 1..3 identifier CLI "api") and so many "drive by" PLang tester-outers might want to roll a little CLI around some procs their working on.

Also, beyond the echo x,y is same as echo(x,y) or x.echo(y) or x.echo y, the amount of syntax flexibility is dramatically more than Python. You can have user-defined operators like `>>>` or `!!!` or `.*`. There are also some experimental and probably buggy compiler features to do "term re-writing macros" so that your matrix/bignum library could in theory re-write some bz*ax+y expression into a more one-pass loop (or maybe conditionally depending upon problem scale).

I sometimes summarize this as "Nim Is Choice". Some people don't like to have to/get to choose. To others it seems critical.

Someone even did some library to make `def` act like `proc`, but I forget its name. Nim has a lot more routine styles than Python, including a special iterator syntax whose "call" is a for-construct.

[1] https://github.com/c-blake/cligen/blob/master/cligen/print.n...