Does the nix expression language have a specification?

[toraritte]

Wanted to suggest an RFC for it but not sure if the reason for the lack of a formal Nix language specification is a deliberate choice or the lack of human-power to keep it maintained.

@efx

hnix actually embed’s a version of the lexer in their doc directory!

Totally missed this, thanks!

@efx

I’d guess that the more formalized nickel will supersede nix expression language someday.

Thanks for the reminder regarding Nickel; there is also this thread you may be interested in:

Nickel: the Nix (language) spin-off

For those who attended NixCon on Saturday, I presented in a lightening talk an on-going project called Nickel. This is a configuration programming language inspired from Nix. It is still not at release stage, but if you want to learn more, there’s a fresh blog post about it, and we recently made the repo public. Cheers P.S: don’t mind the current ugly examples in src/examples, they are quite old and need to be rewritten once we’ve made a pass on the syntax.

(Along with the periodic Tweag + Nix dev updates.)