Boo gotchas for beginners

Unlike what I mentioned in my previous post, I ended up trying Boo first. I will delve on the reason in another post. The objective of this post is to document the problems I had getting used to Boo syntax. None of the problems were big, just some missing punctuations 🙂 And I did not face any issues with the significant space.

Empty array vs. Empty list

An empty list is

[]

and an empty map is

{}

And empty array is

(,)

as it would cause ambiguity with a function / closure.

Type declaration vs. Initialisation

Declaration:

_myDict as Dictionary[of string, object]

Initialisation:

_myDict = Dictionary[of string, object]()

Assigning a Type vs. invoking a function

When you are calling a function don’t forget the brackets at the end.

Wrong:

fs = file.OpenRead

Correct:

fs = file.OpenRead()

If you make this mistake you will get errors like:

‘<method/property>’ is not a member of ‘<some type>’. (BCE0019)

Colon is the new semicolon

Remember the times when a missing semicolon used to be causing most compile errors, well, in boo it will be the missing colon which signifies a beginning of a block.

Wrong:

while ((line = filestream.ReadLine()) != null)

m.parse(line)

Correct:

while ((line = filestream.ReadLine()) != null):

m.parse(line)

If you forget the colon, you will get an error like:


Unexpected token: m. (BCE0043)
Unexpected token: <INDENT>. (BCE0043)
expecting "EOF", found '<DEDENT>'. (BCE0044)


Function definition in a script file

Maybe a no-brainer for python gurus, but if you have a script file, i.e. a file with no class, just instructions; functions are to be defined near the top of the script and called after it is def‘ed.

You can’t mix Boo with C# in same project

This is my mistake, but looking at samples having groovy and java files in same project; I blindly assumed that the same applies to Boo as well.

Intellisense / auto-complete does not work well.

Given the dynamic nature of Boo and maybe some bugs in SharpDevelop, it is not a great experience if you rely heavily on intellisense.

Embedding special characters in a string

Boo follows the python way of embedding special characters in string and not c#.

Wrong:

s = @“C:\path\to\dir\”

Correct:

s = “””C:\path\to\dir\”””

Embedding values in strings

The syntax is slightly weird, but useful nonetheless. You need to use both $ and enclose the variable in curly braces.

print “processing ${dir.Name}“

Still can’t find a way to pattern match and assign in the same line

I think this is possible, but I can’t figure a way to match a strung and assign the values to 2 variables.

I am trying to do something like, below and a few variations without luck:

key, val = /(?<key>[^=\s]+)\s*=\s*”(?<value>.+)”\s*$/.Match(line)

If the regex would have been simpler I could have used the Split instead of Match and things would have worked.

I ended up with something like:

data = /(?<key>[^=\s]+)\s*=\s*”(?<value>.+)”\s*$/.Match(line)

key, val = data.Groups[“key”].Value, data.Groups[“value”].Value

Embedding spaces in a regular expression patterns

As seen in the regex sample above, take extra care when you want to match a space. Use \s instead of a literal space.