Jacinda is a functional pattern sifting language, a smaller AWK.
Installation
Releases
There are binaries for some platforms on the releases page.
If you are on Mac, you will need to install *-librure.dylib as well.
From Source
First, install Rust's regex library. You'll need to put librure.so or librure.dylib etc. in the appropriate place.
If you have cabal and GHC installed (perhaps via ghcup):
cabal install jacinda
Editor Support
There is a vim plugin and a VSCode extension.
Usefulness
Unix uses record separators in many places; we can display one entry in the PATH variable with:
echo $PATH | ja -F: "{|[x+'
'+y]|>\`$}"
Many Unix tools output much information separated with spaces. We use regular expressions to match relevant lines and then select the field with the data itself, viz.
otool -l $(locate libpng.dylib) | ja '{`1 ~ /^name/}{`2}'
To get the value of a variable (say, PATH ) from the output of printenv :
printenv | ja -F= '{%/^PATH/}{`2}'
Rosetta
Replace
NF == 1 && $1 != "}" { haveversion[$1] = 1 } END { for (i in haveversion) printf "have-%s = yes
", i }
with
(sprintf 'have-%s = yes')" ~.{nf=1 & `1 != '}'}{`1}
Documentation
See the guide, which contains a tutorial on some of the features as well as examples.
The manpages document the builtins and provide a syntax reference.
Status
Missing Features & Bugs
No nested dfns
No list literal syntax
Postfix :f and :i are handled poorly
and are handled poorly Streams of functions don't work
Higher-order functions are subtly broken
Intentionally missing features:
No loops
Advantages
Rust's regular expressions extensively documented with Unicode support
Deduplicate builtin
Contributing
I have rewritten the code several times so forking and applying patches is fraught!
Bug reports are welcome contributions.