SLC - What is it

SLC Demo action

SLC | Introduction

The SkyLine Configuration language and engine is as talked about before a subset of SkyLine, it is not directly the SkyLine programming language and can not be used as a general purpose or task based programming language. You can think of SLC as just another configuration syntax or data language that is actually useful. SLC's prime focus is to help users and developers manage their projects and manage their code bases. This language will also help generate projects, manage and configure the internals of a SkyLine code environment.

SLC | Technical details

Unlike SkyLine, SLC is not a hybrid executable language which means it only uses one form and step for code execution, standard interpretation. This means that the code is run through an evaluator, not a machine code or byte code compiler. SLC is a dynamically typed, interpreted only, configuration language.

SLC | Why it exists and where from?

SLC exists for many different reasons. As talked about in the SkyLine | Introduction section of this book, its prime origin comes from the RPC programming language that also had their own separate engine's to help with project development and generation. In some programming language's, you can auto generate direct directories, setup project configuration files and etc all with a simple command line flag or loading a configuration file. Well, instead of just modifying the external environment of a code environment, it is there to modify the internals.

The SkyLine programming language has an experimental function known as a modifier, similar to pragma but much much MUCH more advanced and unique than that. The syntax of a modifier was as follows.

modify("environment@[conf1, conf2, conf3]")

The modifier would allow users to modify the internal behavior of a specific system within the runtime of the language. Users would be able to modify statements, codes, the verbosity of errors, the way error systems output data or information, the way the parser interacts with rules ( strict or not strict ) and even modify lexical analysis. Eventually, the use case and idea's for modify became too large and annoying to type, so modifiers have been deprecated in later versions of SkyLine including Nightly versions of the language.

The SkyLine configuration language and its engine allows you to not only configure the external environments, generate and load code but also allows users to export specific environments and import them while also being able to configure or change specific sets of the SkyLine internal environment.