NiStructures 

  

 NiExpressions 

 NiCallBackExample 

  

 NiOptimisations 

  

  

 Partially, Ni also has a few other goals. One of the major ones is that programmers introduce bugs, usually at a constant rate per line of code written. By reducing the amount of programming a programmer has to do, and using the compiler to try and detect bugs earlier, more reliable programs can be written. Ni attempts to do this by: 

  

 !!Using pre and post conditions 

  

  def foo(int i): 

  return 5/i 

  

  

 Much of this came about after looking at programs which contained comments like: 

  /* ptr cannot be null here, because ... */ 

  assert(NULL != ptr); 

  

 !!Datastructure operations are determined by the compiler. 

 A lot of programming is spent maintaining various datastructures (hash tables, linked lists etc). Even in langauges which have runtime libraries which provide redblack tree's, hashtables, and the like the programmer still has to decide which of these to use. Many programmers don't know when a redblack tree would be an appropraite datastructure to use. Part of what "Ni" provides built into the language is a "dictionary" structure similar to [PHP]'s array's. These are ordered associative maps. The compiler can look at which operations are used on them and use the most efficient implementation, or, in some cases, more than one implementation, for example: 

  

  print data.pop() 

 Now, the only used methods are insertSorted() and data.pop(), so the "best" implementation of this would be a PriorityQueue, the memory ca n be statically allocated at 10 items, since we know at compile time that that is the maximum size of the heap. 

  

 This leaves the programmer free from having to think about datastructures and just thinking about the "business logic" of their program.