CHAIN!

Summary

refinement and function call dialect

Kind

Fundamental type

A sequence of elements joined by colons. Setting and getting are spelled with chains: a: sets, and :a gets. A function’s refinements are chained on, as in append:dup.

CHAIN! replaced the historical SET-WORD!, GET-WORD!, SET-PATH! (and so on) types, which were special cases of this.

In a mixed sequence, slashes bind loosest and dots tightest: foo/bar.baz:mumble is a PATH! whose second element is a CHAIN! starting with a TUPLE!.

Sequences are immutable. They are not ANY-SERIES?, so they have no position or index, and can’t be changed in place. Elements can still be picked by index or walked with FOR-EACH; to restructure one, convert it to a BLOCK! and back. A sequence has at least two elements, and can’t contain a sequence of the same kind directly.