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13929 :: Sorry Nim, I Missed My Curlies 🙈{}

• merhab (orginal) [2026-05-20T07:15:17+02:00] view original

  Oh and one more thing — a small confession from the lab 🧪

  You know how Nim forces you to choose between its Python-style indentation and… that's it, that's the only option? Yeah, I got a bit restless 😅

  So I may have done something slightly unhinged and taught Nim to accept both Python-style indentation and C-style curly braces. At the same time. In the same codebase. Because I missed my curlies and I'm not sorry 🙃

  
  nimproc add(a, b: int): int {
    return a + b
  }
  # also still works:
  proc add(a, b: int): int =
    return a + b
  Run

  Is it official? No.

  Is it upstream? Absolutely not.

  Is it for everyone? Please no 😂

  Is it cursed? Possibly.

  Does it work for me? Beautifully.

  This is a personal hack for personal sanity, layered on community-owned Nim code. The Nim community is wonderful and I have nothing but respect for the language — I just have a complicated relationship with significant whitespace that goes back further than I'd like to admit 👴

  Don't use this. Don't ask about this. Pretend you didn't read this.

  ...but if you're also a curly brace person living reluctantly in an indentation world, you know where to find me 🤝

  https://github.com/GroupMerhab/curly_nim.git

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• Leopotam (orginal) [2026-05-20T09:04:30+02:00] view original

  How you will work with template/macroses then? For example, its boring to open/close/parse config files to me and i wrote something like this:

  
  template withFile(fname: string, body: untyped): untyped =
    block:
      var lines {.inject.}: seq[string]
      if fileExists(fname):
        lines = readFile(fname).strip.splitLines
      var origLinesCount = lines.len
      if origLinesCount == 1 and lines[0].len == 0:
        lines.setLen(0)
        origLinesCount = 0
      body
      if lines.len != origLinesCount:
        lines.add("")
        writeFile(fname, lines.join("\n"))
  Run

  And use it then:

  
    withFile ".gitignore":
      lines.addUnique("build/")
      lines.addUnique("tmp/")
      lines.addUnique("data/*.bundle")
      lines.addUnique("/config.nims")
      lines.addUnique("/nimble.paths")
      lines.addUnique("znak_platforms/")
      lines.addUnique("/znak")
      lines.addUnique("/znak.exe")
  Run

  How you will be able to create similar thing with curly braces?

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• merhab (orginal) [2026-05-20T09:48:17+02:00] view original

  Ha, yeah this fork is purely for my own enjoyment and sanity — I’m not trying to convince anyone to switch! It’s just a personal scratch-my-own-itch thing. But to actually answer your question — nothing breaks. body: untyped captures AST, not text, so your templates and macros work exactly the same. Just write the brace on the same line as the call and it’s identical behavior.

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