The use of brackets to denote function arguments and pretty text output in the terminal reminds me very strongly of using Mathematica from the command line.
You are very right. I studied the screenshots of Stephen Wolfram's earlier project SMP and later the early versions of Mathematica. And the Calca later was a language inspiration.
I always found it odd about Mathematica that a low level programming language like C gets closer to mathematical notation with sin(x) than Mathematica with Sin[x]
In Mahematica any keyword can be used as an unbound variable. So you need a way to disambiguate f(x) meaning f multiplied by x vs. f[x] meaning f applied to x. If you use parentheses for both you'd have to give up the ability to express multiplication as a(b) which would be a bigger loss I think.
There are two reasons; first is that I tried to render parentheses in the terminal and they didn’t look good, it was brackets that looked good. So that is the actual reason but also writing brackets do not require shift so I prefer it myself to type more easily
Whatever your initial motivation, distinguishing between precedence modification and function application is an unmitigated good in my opinion, so good on you.
Do you plan to extend the language with symbolic capabilities?
Actually Id love to. I did a bad choice of writing Nota in Haskell. I will rewrite it in JavaScript so that I can also port it to the web and then if possible I will add as much more capability as I can. Symbolic is super cool but hard to implement, I should see how much time I have and how much others are willing to help.
This, and issues like it, bug me so much. So many keyboard shortcuts are unusable by default on QWERTZ, for example any shortcuts involving /, [ or ]. They require modifiers to be typed, so those are swallowed for shortcut purposes.
Of course, it is (almost) impossible to account for the enormous amount of keyboard layouts that exist, so I wish we could agree to use key positions over the characters they produce for shortcuts, so we can cover a significant portion of the population with ANSI/ISO layouts. I'm honestly not sure what keyboard layouts are used in countries with entirely different scripts, but my cursory Google searches suggest the physical layout is the same as ours.
Sure, you might lose some mnemonics on layouts that aren't QWERTY, but at least the majority of shortcuts would be usable by default compared to having to remap them in every application. The application could even resolve what keys are actually mapped to the physical keys and display the correct shortcut in menus.
Destiny 2 actually seems to do this and does, as far as I was able to tell, an excellent job of it.
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/UsingATextBa...