Nushell core team meeting 2025-01-22

Attendees

Quick check, any objections to #14397?
Assignment statements or expressions
#14865 Add examples, categories, search_terms with test, bench, deprecated, platform attributes, etc. to custom commands Discord Discussion
#14873 Track where we are at with the voting on How essential is remembering the current directory for each Windows drive letter?
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greenlit, change the name of decimal to metric for the kB/MB series, keep binary for KiB

Current state

let/const/mut are statement only
- (not allowed in pipeline elements)
$mutable = reassignment is expressiony
- somewhat more involved rules on precedence/associativity to the | pipe
  Proposal make all assignment expression like (so the operation returns the same value and you can chain assignments)
Pro:
- repl brevity
- more consistent rules between binding/reassignment
Caveats:
- cloning of the value
- (what is the rule in statement level on REPL)
- confusability with ==
- potentially confusing order of operations
- collection may not be obvious based on chosen syntax

Somewhat orthogonal but additive:

Being able to pipe into a variable instead of leading with the lhs
- pipeline | let x
- This would mesh well with the expressiony logic
- stream | let x | do more stuff
  - challenge around stream vs collecting (looking over at the tee code maybe to assign while streaming)

motivation: provide examples etc.
- great for getting parity of std or other modules with the builtins
different syntax proposals:
- flag on the def command
  - readability concern
  - existing impl in #14865
- @example (optional const expression) etc. attributes
  - simpler to parse for external tools
  - could this generalize to even custom attributes
Sentiment leave --env and --wrapped untouched for now, general preference towards the attribute syntax for the rest