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Theory

The grammar of TAO includes the following rule (in BNF):

<operator>   ::= "`" <any>

Where any is any printable Unicode character.

The operator is a very simple, yet very versatile concept, which captures the essence of many syntactical constructs. It has 2 basic roles in TAO:

1. Escape mechanism for the 3 meta symbols of the grammar, i.e. [, ], and ` (the operator symbol itself).

2. Extension mechanism for future notations based on TAO as well as for custom ad-hoc notations – either community-built notations that might become standard or limited-use internal notations. There is thus a risk associated with abuse of this mechanism. In the spirit of TAO, the use of operators should be kept to a minimum.

Furthermore, an important property of the operator is that a single operator meta symbol ` introduces two annotation insertion points at the same depth in the syntax tree – on either side of the operator. This enables slightly more compact notations than could be achieved otherwise.

The property is also where operator gets its name from. It is however a more primitive and lower-level construct than a programming language operator – a programming language built on top of TAO could use it to represent operators.

Practice

What follows from the grammar definition, but is perhaps worth noting, is that operators are always single-character. A possible way to model a multi-character high-level operators could be to use a low-level operator for “quoting” these, e.g.

a`.<=>`.b

Here `. is the low-level quoting operator and <=> is the high-level multicharacter quoted operator.

A less generic, but a more compact way could be (colored for clarity):

a`<=>[b]

Here `< could be a low-level operator that introduces a class of high-level operators. The annotation that follows it – => – determines a specific high level operator (<=>). What follows is a tree that contains the right-hand-side argument to the high-level operator.

Better practice

A programming language built in the true spirit of TAO however would avoid both of the above solutions. A better one would not use operators in this case at all, e.g.:

[a]<=>[b]

But that’s a story for another time.