If you’ve heard of Racket “at-expressions”, maybe you think they’re “that funny Scribble notation in which you write Racket documentation.”

In fact at-expressions are a general, alternative way to write s-expressions. They can be used in various handy ways.

Let’s look at using at-expressions for a few practical things like:

• “string interpolation”
• regular expressions
• “here” strings

#lang at-exp ...

You can use the at-expression reader with a language by supplying at-exp before the language. Examples:

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#lang at-exp racket
#lang at-exp typed/racket

In the examples below, make sure you’re using:

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#lang at-exp racket

~a

Before we talk more about at-expressions, note that racket/format provides the function ~a. (~a v) is a kind of shorthand for (format "~a" v), plus it offers many more formatting options.

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#lang racket
(format "~a" "hi") ;"hi"
(~a "hi")          ;"hi"
(format "~a" 1)    ;"1"
(~a 1)             ;"1"

We’ll use ~a below.

Basic at-expressions

At-expressions are a very well thought-out system; you can read about the full syntax. For this post, we simply need to know that @func{string} is equivalent to (func "string"). So we can rewrite:

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(~a "foo bar") ; "foo bar"

as:

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@~a{foo bar}   ; "foo bar"

(Note that ~a is the name of the function we’re calling. The ~ has nothing to do with at-expressions; it’s part of this function’s name.)

Also special characters like \ and " are automatically escaped:

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@~a{A back slash \}   ; "A back slash \\"
@~a{"Double quotes"}  ; "\"Double quotes\""

Inside the curly brackets, you may use @ again to “escape” to any Racket expression. For example an expression like (+ 1 1):

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@~a{The sum of one and one is @(+ 1 1).} ; "The sum of one and one is 2."

Or simply the name of a variable like x:

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(define x 0)
@~a{x is @x} ; "x is 0"

String interpolation

You can use at-exps as the equivalent of “string interpolation” in some other languages:

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(define x 0)
(define y "foo")

@~a{x is @x and y is @y} ; "x is 0 and y is foo"

Normally in Racket you’d write that as:

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(format "x is ~a and y is ~a" x y)

Which is fine, albeit you have to flip between the ~as on the left and the values on the right, making sure they match up. The string interpolation style is arguably easier to write, to read, and to update later without making a mistake.

How about mixing formats, such as ~a (display) and ~v (print)? For example with format we can write

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(format "x is ~a and y is ~v" x y)` ; "x is 0 and y is \"foo\""

How can we do this using our at-exp? Well since ~a is the outer function it will display the value of any ~v inside. Remember that @ lets us “escape” to any Racket expression, not just a variable, it could be a function application. So:

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@~a{x is @x and y is @(~v y)} ; "x is 0 and y is \"foo\""

You can also surround the Racket expression in | characters. This is useful if the expression needs to end next to plain text. You can demarcate the identifier from the text:

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@~a{x is @|x| and y is @|y|!} ; "x is 0 and y is foo!"

The | keeps ! from being read as part of the identifier y.

Regular expressions

Do you enjoy writing regular expressions like #px"\\d\\.\\d"? Me neither.

Another useful example is avoiding the need to use \\ to get a \ in string literals. This is especially handy for regular expressions:

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@pregexp{\d\.\d}  ; #px"\\d\\.\\d"

If you find pregexp too verbose, you could define a little alias:

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(define px pregexp)
@px{\d\.\d}      ; #px"\\d\\.\\d"

“Here” strings

Like shells, Racket has “here” strings:

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(define multi-line #<<EOF
Some multi-line
string literal.
EOF
)
multi-line ; "Some multi-line\nstring literal."

Cool. However the indentation is tricky. You get extra spaces if you do this:

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(define multi-line #<<EOF
  Some multi-line
  string literal.
EOF
)
multi-line ; "  Some multi-line\n  string literal."

Oops.

Also the EOF must be alone on a line and in column 0. You can’t let that get indented, and you can’t put the closing paren on the same line.

At-exps are more elegant and survive typical re-indentation:

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(define multi-line @~a{Some multi-line
                       string literal})
multi-line ; "Some multi-line\nstring literal"

How to write a literal @

If @ is a magic escape character, how do you write a literal @?

1. We want a string, "@".

2. How do we escape to any Racket expression, including (say) a string? Using @.

3. Therefore prepend a @ to "@":

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@"@"

So for example:

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@~a{The email is foo@"@"bar.com} ; "The email is foo@bar.com"

Conclusion

This was a quick look at some practical ways to use at-expressions for more than writing Scribble documentation. Again, feel free to read up on the full syntax.