TAO: ops

Note: This is subject to future work. Errors, ambiguities, and omissions are to be expected.

In TAO’s grammar, op is defined as:

• op is the symbol ` followed by any symbol.

Primarily, it introduces an escape mechanism for the brackets, so that they can be parsed as non-meta and “included” in notes. From the perspecitve of the parser though, whatever follows the op symbol is opaque. No escaping or including happens there.

Escaping should instead be handled by a layer separate from the parser.

By defining op in terms of any rather than restricting it to the meta symbols only, a space is opened for extensions that need not be a part of the basic syntax, but are permitted by it. On the other hand we can also introduce restrictions to op outside of the syntax.

Features introduced by ops may be contextual.

Some standard features that are enabled by ops include:

• comments
• type annotations
• padded keys

Other, incuding experimental, features may be introduced in a similar way.