Conditionals

Conditionals in a language are a means of describing blocks of code that may potentially execute, so long as certain conditions are met. In Ion, as with every other language, we support this via if statements, but unlike POSIX shells, we have a cleaner syntax that will require less boilerplate, and increase readability.

If Statements

The if keyword in Ion is designated as a control flow keyword, which works similar to a builtin command. The if builtin will have it's supplied expression parsed and executed. The return status of the executed command will then be utilized as a boolean value. Due to the nature of how shells operate though, a logical true result is a 0 exit status, which is an exit status that commands return when no errors are reported. If the value is not zero, it is considered false. Sadly, we can't go back in time to tell early UNIX application developers that 1 should indicate success, and 0 should indicate a general error, so this behavior found in POSIX shells will be preserved.

We supply a number of builtin commands that are utilized for the purpose of evaluating expressions and values that we create within our shell. One of these commands is the test builtin, which is commonly found in other POSIX shells, and whose flags and operation should be identical. We also supply a not builtin, which may be convenient to use in conjuction with other commands in order to flip the exit status; and a matches builtin that performs a regex-based boolean match.

if test "foo" = $foo
    echo "Found foo"
else if matches $foo '[A-Ma-m]\w+'
    echo "we found a word that starts with A-M"
    if not matches $foo '[A]'
        echo "The word doesn't start with A"
    else
        echo "The word starts with 'A'"
    end
else
    echo "Incompatible word found"
end

A major distinction with POSIX shells is that Ion does not require that the if statement is followed with a then keyword. The else if statements are also written as two separate words, rather than as elif which is POSIX. And all blocks in Ion are ended with the end keyword, rather than fi to end an if statement. There is absolutely zero logical reason for a shell language to have multiple different keywords to end different expressions.

Complete List of Conditional Builtins

• and
• contains
• exists
• eq
• intersects
• is
• isatty
• matches
• not
• or
• test
• < (Polish Notation)
• <= (Polish Notation)
• > (Polish Notation)
• >= (Polish Notation)
• = (Polish Notation)

Using the && and || Operators

We also support performing conditional execution that can be performed within job execution, using the same familiar POSIX syntax. The && operator denotes that the following command should only be executed if the previous command had a successful return status. The || operator is therefore the exact opposite. These can be chained together so that jobs can be skipped over and conditionally-executed based on return status. This enables succintly expressing some patterns better than could be done with an if statement.

if test $foo = "foo" && test $bar = "bar"
    echo "foobar was found"
else
    echo "either foo or bar was not found"
end

test $foo = "foo" && test $bar = "bar" &&
    echo "foobar was found" ||
    echo "either foo or bar was not found"