Text

In Ranty, text is made from fragments, whitespace, and hinted expression units. Any text is also valid Ranty source, but whitespace is normalized unless you opt into other behavior.

Fragments and same-line whitespace

Plain source text becomes output fragments. By default, same-line whitespace between adjacent fragments or hinted elements is normalized to a single ASCII space.

One  two   three

One two three

Line breaks do not add spaces by themselves.

Water
melon

Watermelon

Escaped whitespace such as \s and \t always prints literally.

Hinting

A backtick before an expression unit marks it as hinted. Hinted units participate in surrounding whitespace as if they were ordinary fragments.

<$name = "world">Hello, `<name>!

Hello, world!

Some units become implicitly hinted in text-heavy positions, and @text can mark definitions and parameters as auto-hinted. See @text for the full rules.

Sinking

~ does the opposite of a hint: it tells the compiler not to treat the next expression unit like text. This is useful when formatting code with spaces that should not survive into output.

{\:} ~{\(}

:(

The sink and hint operators are compile-time annotations. Using them in unsupported positions is a compiler error.

String literals

String literals count as single text units and preserve their contents without normal fragment splitting:

"This string literal includes ""quoted"" text"

Multi-line string literals are also valid.

Text vs. string

string is a runtime value type. Text is part of the source program. Normalization, hinting, sinking, and formatters can make the printed result differ from the original source spelling.