Nitpick Syntactic Sugar Operator Family

Nitpick heavily utilizes punctuation-based operators as syntactic sugar to condense common boilerplate, particularly around error handling, null coalescing, and functional data flows.

1. Unwrapping and Safety (The ? Family)

• ? : Safe Unwrap. If the preceding function returns a Result error, swallow the error and assign the default value provided after the operator.
• ?? : Null Coalesce. If the preceding value is NIL, fallback to the right-hand value.
• ?! : Emphatic Unwrap. If the preceding Result is an error, instantly invoke failsafe() passing it the hardcoded error code provided after the operator.
• ?. : Safe Navigation. Only access the member property if the left hand side is not NIL.

2. Desugared Keyword Aliases

Nitpick allows short-hand symbolic aliases for some of its explicit safety keywords. These desugar directly into the keywords during the parsing phase: * ?| : Desugars to defaults (used in complex expression chains) * _? : Desugars to drop (evaluate but discard the Result<T>) * _! : Desugars to raw (evaluate and extract the value from Result<T>, ignoring the safety flag)

3. Data Flow (Piping)

Nitpick supports functional-style piping to pass the result of one function directly into the argument of another, avoiding deeply nested parentheses. * |> : Pipe forward (pass LHS as first argument to RHS) * <| : Pipe backward (pass RHS as argument to LHS)

4. Ranges

• .. : Inclusive range (e.g., 1..10 includes 10)
• ... : Exclusive range (e.g., 1...10 stops at 9)