Understanding Values

Ultimately the point of any program is to produce a value. The Technique language has serveral value types:

Unit

The unit type is written a : () -> ()\n and its sole value Unitus is written {()}.

String literals

Literal text string in Technique are called Literali and are written as you'd expect, enclosed with double-quotes: {"Late, as in the Late Arthur Dent"}. Newlines can be included in strings, escaped with {"\n"}.

Numbers

Numbers are either integrals which is to say signed integers, {42}, or quantities, which are measurements with (optional) magnitude, uncertainty, and units. {5.9722 ± 0.0006 × 10²⁴ kg} was the mass of the planet earth, until about five minutes ago. Both kinds of number are recorded as Quanticle values.

Key/Value Tables

Ultimately you need to label and group the values you create, and a tablet is the way to do this. A tablet returned by a procedure or function is a Tabularum value in Technique. Literal values can be written

{
[
  "answer" = 42
  "question" = ?
]
}

where {["answer"=1]} and {["question"=1]} are the fields and each is assigned a value.

We also see the hole character {?}, indicating a Futurae, a value to be supplied later, at runtime. Normally you dont need this, but sometimes you have to be explicit in your code about values you don't know yet and have to wait a few million years for.

There are times when you need to supply a list, for example to {foreach x in y} when iterating or as arguments provided to a procedure whose signature requires a list. In those situations you can write a tablet without labels and with values separated by commas {[ 1, 4, 9 ]}, thus creating an Arraeum.