Anyone built anything with Pony?

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There were quite a few mentions of it in this thread…

Not a fan of the syntax myself (not keen on whitespace significance in languages)…

class Wombat
  let name: String
  var _hunger_level: U64
  var _thirst_level: U64 = 1

  new create(name': String) =>
    name = name'
    _hunger_level = 0

  new hungry(name': String, hunger': U64) =>
    name = name'
    _hunger_level = hunger'

Though…

Pony and Whitespace

Whitespace (e.g. spaces, tabs, newlines, etc.) in Pony isn’t significant.

Well, it mostly isn’t significant.

Mostly insignificant whitespace

Pony reads a bit like Python, which is a whitespace significant language. That is, the amount of indentation on a line means something in Python. In Pony, the amount of indentation is meaningless.

That means Pony programmers can format their code in whatever way suits them.

There are three exceptions:

  1. A - at the beginning of a line starts a new expression (unary negation), whereas a - in the middle of an expression is a binary operator (subtraction).
  2. A ( at the beginning of a line starts a new expression (a tuple), whereas a ( in the middle of an expression is a method call.
  3. A [ at the beginning of a line starts a new expression (an array literal), whereas a [ in the middle of an expression is generic formal parameters.

That stuff may seem a little esoteric right now, but we’ll explain it all later. The - part should make sense though.

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