zlacker

> scream for a case/switch-statement

Maybe I’m missing some context, but all that actually should be needed in the top-level else block is ‘gradient[idx]’. Pretty much anything else is going to be longer, harder to read, and less efficient.

>>antonv+(OP)
True, with early return - there's no need to actually nest with else.

Logically this still would be a case/switch though...

>>e12e+Bd
The point was that logically it would be an array lookup by index.

There's no need for any conditional construct here whatsoever.

You'll note it has already constructed a string in the right order to do that, but then copped out with the if-else.

>>vidarh+vl
True enough. On that note, I had a look at the language reference - there's arrays - but also this:

    (char_at s index)        # Get ASCII value at index (0-based)
    (string_from_char code)  # Create string from ASCII value

So, you can pluck a character... From an UTF-8 string? What if the rendering used multibyte characters?

>>e12e+4M
Well, we can see the string, and we can see that is uses plain ASCII.

>>vidarh+rA1
In this case, sure. But what if we shifted to rendering with emojis or whatnot. What would the first ASCII character of the string be?

>>e12e+KD1
If you anticipate that need, you just store the gradient as an array of strings, and you still then only need a trivial lookup.

>>vidarh+cE4
I was more commenting on the language design here; the idea of indexing into a UTF-8 string and returning an ASCII character. What does the index count? Bytes? There doesn't seem to be a way to get UTF-8 characters from strings?

Ed: There seems to be an UTF-8 library:

https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/tree/main/modules/...