The slate documentation
The split is between what the compiler enforces, what ships beside it, what somebody else has written — and, last, what is still only a design.
| Getting started | install it, write a program, run its tests, compile it to JavaScript |
| A tour for JavaScript and TypeScript people | only the differences, and the reason for each |
| Language reference | every construct written down once, in its own place, with the rules complete |
| The library | what a program has without writing it: the globals, and the slate: modules |
| The packages | what is written in slate today — a server, a client, a framework |
| Design | what is not built yet, argued before the work — and not run, where everything above is |
The README on the repository is the shorter thing: what slate is, how to install it, and enough of a taste to decide whether to read further.
What these pages are for
A reference answers the question you actually have. What may follow for? Which of sort and
sorted changes the array? What exactly does ?. guard? Where does a default parameter’s expression
run? Those are lookups, and prose that reads well start to finish answers them only by accident.
Where a rule exists for a reason, the reason is here too. A page that lists behaviour and stops tells you what to type and leaves you unable to predict anything you have not looked up yet. slate’s rules lean on one another — the refusal to store absence decides what a default parameter is, which decides what an arity complaint can say — so the connections are written down where they matter.
Every program on these pages is meant to run. Where a page shows a refusal, the sentence is the one the compiler really prints.
And they are run, which is why they can be trusted
A fenced block on these pages is not a picture of a program — it is the program. slate’s own test suite walks every page here and runs what it finds:
- a
slateblock with anoutputblock under it is run, and what it prints is compared; - a
slateblock with anerrorblock under it is run, required to fail, and the diagnostic required to contain that text; - a
slateblock with neither is a fragment, quoted for its shape.
So a page cannot drift from the compiler without failing the build, and the counts are written down per page so a block that quietly loses its claim shows up as a page whose runnable count fell. Writing these pages that way found five claims that were not true, none of which would have been caught by reading.