Apertures provide several benefits:

Use any name: U has no direct keywords, allowing flexibility in naming.
Efficient compilation process: Anything not guarded by an Aperture is sent directly to the parser and processed as user code, ensuring a streamlined compilation process (benchmark results coming soon).
Control all compiler phases: Apertures allow you to define generics, create complex types, and fine-tune hardware attributes similar to alignof in GCC or attributes in Clang.
Extend U grammar: You can define user functions or embed another language to declare your data in formats like YAML or use CSS.

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An Aperture consists of one or more operators beginning with colon : or escape \ like ':', ':%', or '\'. Apertures interrupt user code processing to enable dynamic code execution. Only operators are allowed as Apertures; no alphanumeric characters can be used.

Since the colon : and escape \ characters are reserved for Apertures, operators cannot start with these characters.

Apertures provide several benefits:

• Use any name: U has no direct keywords, allowing flexibility in naming.
• efficient compilation process: Anything not guarded by an Aperture is sent directly to the parser and processed as user code, ensuring a streamlined compilation process (benchmark results coming soon).
• Control all compiler phases: Apertures allow you to define generics, create complex types, and fine-tune hardware attributes similar to __alignof__ in GCC or attr__attributes__ in Clang.

• Extend U grammar: You can define user functions or embed another language to declare your data in formats like YAML or use CSS.

  # This will generate an Array with ['name', 'password']
  :%yaml{
  - name
  - password
  }
  

With Apertures, most programming patterns can be expressed. Each aperture has its meaning to cover nearly all compiler phases.

U has the following apertures:

• Starting with Colon (:):

  • Parser Directives – Colon (:): create symbols symbols, or functions.

  • Lexer Directives – Percent (:%): scan source code as HTML.

  • Keywords – Double Colon (::): create classes with ::A, control flow with ::if.

  • Pattern Matching – Question Mark (:?).

  • Type & Specification Directives – At (@): annotate value as int.

  • Error Handling Directives – Exclamation Mark (:!)

  • Concurrency Directives – Pipe (:|): create concurrent or parallel tasks.

  • Pointer Directives – Ampersand (:&): manage pointers or references.

• Starting with Escape (\):

  • Compiler Directives – Escape (\): import files, print value.

• Starting with Double Escape (#):

  • Test Directives – Question Mark (#?): manage unit and functional tests.
  • Debugging Directives – Exclamation Mark (#!).
  • Assembly Directives – Dollar (#$).

For a complete aperture list, see Grammar.

All apertures will be frozen on version 1.0 with community submissions. Feel free to contribute with your ideas.