Discussion: Design Goals

[kirsle]

Related to #1, list some of the important design considerations that should go into the new language. I'll give some examples to start with.

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• Unicode as a first-class citizen. The new language should accept that user messages will oftentimes contain foreign symbols and special characters and it should be able to handle these gracefully. When possible, the user's untainted original message should be available at all stages of the reply process. They should be able to tell the bot their e-mail address and have that string make it all the way through to a custom object macro without losing any meaningful characters along the way.
• Flexible wildcard matching patterns: support syntaxes like *2 to catch "exactly two words" or *~4 to catch "up to four words" and so-on.
• Support out-of-band data transfers in both directions: the bot author could attach an arbitrary key/value store along with the message request and the bot should be able to return similar with its reply.