Specification: BQN system-provided values

This portion of the spec is still potentially subject to major changes.

The • symbol is used to access values other than primitives provided by BQN.

All system values described in the BQN specification are optional: an implementation does not have to include any of them. However, if a system value with one of the names given below is included, then it must have the specified behavior. For namespaces this rule applies to individual fields as well: a namespace may be provided with only some of the fields, but a field with one of the given names must behave as specified.

Execution and scope manipulation

The effect of •Eval should be the same as if its argument were written as source code in the scope where •Eval appears. It can define variables, and modify those in the current scope or a parent.

•ScopedEval creates as new scope for evaluation as it is loaded. Other than its syntactic role, it is effectively equivalent to {•Eval}. Parent scopes are visible from the created scope; to make a scope without this property use •BQN"•Eval" or •BQN"•ScopedEval".

Scripts

•Import loads another BQN script. The script is evaluated in its own isolated scope, and its result is either the result of the last line, or a module if it exports with ⇐ at the top level. If it is a module, then it must be destructured immediately unless first-class namespaces are possible.

The right argument is a filename, which may be relative or absolute. Relative paths are taken relative to the source file where this instance of •Import was written. The left argument, if given, is the list of arguments that should be passed through to the file as •args. If no left argument is given then ⟨⟩ is used for •args. However, the behavior is different in this case. The same file will only be loaded once in a given BQN program by •Import calls with no left argument: the first such call saves the returned value, even if it is mutable, and subsequent calls return this saved value. To avoid this and reload the file, pass a left argument of ⟨⟩.

•args is the arguments passed as the file was invoked, either from the command line or •Import. For command line calls it is a list of strings.

•path simply gives the path of the file in which it appears. It includes a trailing slash but not the name of the file itself.

•name gives the name, including the extension, of the file in which it appears. It doesn't include the path.

•Exit immediately terminates the running BQN process. If the argument is a valid return code (on Unix, an integer), it is returned; otherwise, the default return code (the one returned when the end of the program is reached) is used.

Files

The system namespace value •file deals with file operations. For the purposes of •file, paths in the filesystem are always strings. As with •Import, file paths may be relative or absolute, and relative paths are relative to •path, except in •file.At which allows 𝕨 to specify an alternate base directory. The value •path used for a particular instance of •file is determined by the file that contains that instance.

When a •file function returns a file path or portion of a path, the path is always absolute and canonical, with . and .. components removed.

Possible fields of •file are given in the subsections below.

File paths

The following functions manipulate paths and don't access files. Each takes a relative or absolute path 𝕩, and At may also take a base directory 𝕨.

File metadata

Metadata functions may query information about a file or directory but do not read to or write from it. Each takes a path 𝕩, and some functions also allow new data in 𝕨. The returned data in any case is the specified property.

Times are Unix timestamps, that is, seconds since the Unix epoch, as used by time system values. File permissions on Unix are a three-element list of numbers giving the permissions for the owner, group, and other users. The file type is one of the following characters for the POSIX file types, matching Unix ls -l with 'f' instead of '-'.

• 'f': File
• 'd': Directory
• 'l': Symlink
• 'p': Pipe (FIFO)
• 's': Socket
• 'b': Block device
• 'c': Character device

File access

File access functions read or write files, either by manipulating files as a whole or interacting with the contents. Whole-file functions cannot overwrite target files: that is, Rename and Copy must give an error if a file exists at 𝕨, and CreateDir if a file exists at 𝕩, while Chars, Lines, and Bytes can overwrite the contents of an existing file 𝕨. However, these three functions must give an error if 𝕨 exists and is a directory.

Rename, Copy, and CreateDir return the path of the new file. Remove and RemoveDir return 1 to indicate successful removal (and error otherwise).

List returns filenames only, without full paths. It lists all files and directories including hidden ones, but not the current and parent directory names . and ...

Functions Chars, Lines, and Bytes are all ambivalent. If only 𝕩 is given, then it is a filename, and the result is the contents of the file in the appropriate format. If there are two arguments, then 𝕨 is the filename and 𝕩 is the desired contents. These are written to the file, overwriting its contents, and the absolute filename 𝕨 is returned. The three formats are:

• Chars: BQN characters, or UTF-32. The file is assumed to be UTF-8 encoded.
• Lines: BQN strings. The file is decoded as with chars, then split into lines by CR, LR, or CRLF line endings.
• Bytes: Single-byte values, stored as BQN characters from @ to @+255.

The following short names can also be provided for file access. They can be provided, and use the definitions from above even if •file is not provided.

Open file object

Input and output

•Out prints a string to stdout, with a trailing newline. •Show displays a BQN value to the programmer (the representation is not specified, and does not need to be plain text). •Fmt returns a string (not a character table: lines are separated by linefeeds) indicating how 𝕩 would be printed by the interactive environment. Both •Show and •Fmt may take a left argument configuring how the value should be formatted.

•Repr attempts to return a string so that •BQN •Repr 𝕩 matches 𝕩. If 𝕩 contains any mutable values (operations or namespaces), this is not possible. However, if such a values is stateless, in the sense that they don't access variables outside of their own scopes, it is permissible for •Repr to return source code that would create a value with identical behavior.

Operation properties

Each function in this section is monadic.

•Type gives its argument's type, as a number from the table below:

•Glyph gives the glyph corresponding to a primitive as a single character, for example returning '+' given an argument matching +. It causes an error if the argument is not a primitive.

•Source gives a string containing a block's source, including the enclosing braces {}. It causes an error if the argument is not a block. In contrast to •Glyph, this function does not give full information about 𝕩 because the result cannot convey environment or mutable identity.

•Decompose breaks down one level of a compound function or modifier, returning a list with a code giving what kind of structure it has (as listed in the table below) followed by each of its components. "Other" includes blocks and system functions. Non-operations do not cause an error, but return code -1, then the argument as a single component. The result is thus a list of length 2 to 4, and •Decompose cannot cause an error.

Time

All times are measured in seconds.

The Unix epoch is 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. •UnixTime is intended for absolute time measurement and should be implemented with the method that gives the most accurate result at any given time. •MonoTime is intended for relative measurement and should use the method that gives the most precise time differences over the course of the program. Its return value must never decrease between calls.

•_timed returns the total time taken divided by the number of function calls (𝕨 if provided and 1 otherwise), including the overhead required for the outer loop that counts iterations (which will typically be negligible in comparison to the BQN code).

More accurately the modifier •_maxTime_ may fail if execution of 𝔽 takes over 𝕨𝔾𝕩 seconds, and should fail as quickly as it is practically able to. The most likely way to implement this modifier is to interrupt execution at the given time. If 𝔽 completes before the interrupt there is no need to measure the amount of time it actually took.