Background: what is NGS?

NGS, the Next Generation Shell is a (work in progress) shell and a programming language built ground up for systems engineering tasks. You can think of it as bash that’s designed today: sane syntax, data structures, functional programming, extensibility, cloud in mind, declarative primitives.

What’s the problem with constructing command line arguments?

The problem affects only more “advanced” cases of constructing command line arguments when some arguments might or might not be present. Let’s consider this example:

# Made-up syntax, resembling NGS
args = []
if 'Subnets' in props {
  args += '--subnets'
  args += props['Subnets']
}
if ... {
  args += ...
}
if ... {
  args += ...
}
...
aws elb create-load-balancer ... $args

Wouldn’t it be cleaner to get rid of all the ifs? … and what happens if props['Subnets'] is an empty array?

How Argv facility in NGS solves the problem?

Argv is a result of factoring out the common code bits involved in constructing command line arguments. The ifs above were also factored out. They are now in Argv.

Let’s look at usage example (real NGS code, from AWS library)

argv = Argv({
  '--load-balancer-name': rd.anchor.name
  '--listeners': props.ListenerDescriptions.encode_json()
  '--subnets': rd.opt_prop('Subnets', props).map(only(ResDef, ids))
})
rd.run('create ELB', %(aws elb create-load-balancer $*argv))

The important points here are:

1. Argv is a function with a single parameter which must be of type Hash (also called “dictionary” in some languages)
2. The keys of the Hash are switches’ names (--load-balancer-name, --listeners, --subnets)
3. The values of the Hash are values for the switches

The “if” that decides whether a switch is present in the resulting argv is inside Argv implementation and your code is clean of it. The values of the Hash are considered when Argv decides whether a switch should be present. null, empty array and instances of type EmptyBox are considered by Argv as missing values and it discards the switch. For convenience, instances of type FullBox are unboxed when constructing the result of Argv.

The Argv facility is yet another point among others that shows why NGS and systems engineering tasks are best fit.

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Have a nice weekend!