mi: HELLO -- get, open
Let's try it out in some other languages and programs and see what happens...
machete:src mmphosis$ hello
-bash: hello: command not found
machete:src mmphosis$ python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jun 24 2010, 21:47:49)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> hello
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
NameError: name 'hello' is not defined
>>> ^D
machete:src mmphosis$ ruby
hello
-:1: undefined local variable or method `hello' for main:Object (NameError)
machete:src mmphosis$ perl
hello
machete:src mmphosis$ php
hello
hello
machete:src mmphosis$ cat
hello
hello
In Lisp, I guess the closest word is QUOTE, but in machete it works more like PHP where everything is quoted and the code is embedded. I call this AUTOQUOTE. Instead of emitting something arcane like "command not found" machete prints the text that was read. It also makes it easy to create a hello world program because you simply type hello world and you're done.
You might also think about Hello as a loader that implicitly loads. Or, hello is the boot, the boot loader, the startup, the greeting, init, or AutoExec.bat. It opens, gets, and outputs the contents unfiltered. It could be named all kinds of greeting words: hello, hi, bonjour, greetings, etc... it doesn't have a specific command because like most things in machete: it's implied.
