Analit: Analog Literals for Rust

For all of Rust's great improvements on the status quo of systems languages, one feature has been sorely missing. No, it's not higher-kinded-types, or integer generics, or having a name that includes the letter 'C'. It's analog literals. Ever since Eelis debuted "Analog Literals" in 2005 as a C++ utility, the ability to draw geometry out using ASCII art has set a new bar for what constitutes a minimal-viable-language.

Examples

Analog literals follow a simple syntactic pattern. The pointy corners of things are marked by '+' characters, one unit in the x-axis is represented by '--', and one unit in the Y and Z axes are represented by '|' and '/', respectively. The reason two characters are used to represent just one unit in the x-axis is to compensate for the rectangular shape that characters are rendered with. Analog expressions return a tuple reflecting the dimensions of the drawing. But enough talk--let's see some examples:

One-Dimensional

A line of length one:

assert_eq!(1, analit!(
    +--+
));

A line of length four:

assert_eq!(1, analit!(
    +--------+
));

Two-Dimensional

Two dimensional literals have proven themselves especially valuable to GUI programmers. A square:

assert_eq!((1,1),analit!(
    +--+
    |  |
    +--+
));

A delicious bar of chocolate:

assert_eq!((8,1),analit!(
    +----------------+
    |                |
    +----------------+
));

Three-Dimensional

It's time to dig those red-and-blue glasses out from between the couch cushions; we're going into the next dimension!

assert_eq!((1,1,3),analit!(
        +--+
       /  /|
      /  / +
     /  / /
    +--+ /
    |  |/
    +--+
));

It's like it's coming right out of the screen!

Using Analog Literals in Your Next Project

Simply add the following to your Cargo.toml

[dependencies.analit]
git = "https://github.com/jswrenn/analit"

Or, from the registry: