Standardized Instruction Notation (SIN) is the de-facto standard high-level programming language used in most of the
Unified Deep Space Administration. Instead of relying on keywords in any specific language, it relies primarily on abstract symbols in order to not favor users from any linguistic background. In practice however, most SIN programmers use editors which replace the symbols with relevant keywords in their native language, and the symbols are only displayed when discussing code in multilingual groups.
SIN is partially derived from several
Xicced programming languages and takes some elements, in particular the top-down, left-right writing direction, from languages like
Yyrhxen. Yyrhxen is also used for names (where no symbols in the "naming usage" category are suitable) and comments as a standard, a somewhat contentious point among many non-Xicced (and some Xicced who are not native Yyrhxen speakers) users.
Constructs
SIN supports a large number of constructs allowing use of declarative and imperative, concurrent and sequential programming. Symbols are primarily classified into
actions,
objects, and
modifiers, with most commands consisting of an action and an object.
The lack of clear standards for which paradigms to use in which situations is somewhat of a contentious point among some users of SIN.
Translations
In the standardized english translation adopted by most human standardization organizations, SIN-e (SIN english; typically pronounced as "sine") base symbols are mostly represented by three-letter abbreviations.
However, many users consider this to lead to hard to read code, and prefer an alternate system known as CoSIN-e (Compact SIN-e, typically pronounced as "cosine") which replaces many of the three-letter abbreviations with special characters, such as parentheses and single-character infix and prefix operators. Though many systems do not support CoSIN-e directly, the default implementation of CoSIN-e supports translation to SIN-e and many other SIN translations.
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