Expansions provide dynamic string generation capabilities. These work identical to the standard POSIX way, but there are a few major differences: arrays are denoted with an @ sigil, and have their own variant of process expansions (@()) which splits outputs by whitespace; and our arithmetic logic is destined to be both more feature-complete, supports floating-point math, and handles larger numbers.

Like POSIX shells, the $ sigil denotes that the following expression will be a string expansion. If the character that follows is an accepted ASCII character, all characters that follow will be collected until either a non-accepted ASCII character is found, or all characters have been read. Then the characters that were collected will be used as the name of the string variable to substitute with.

$ let string = "example string"
$ echo $string
> example string
$ echo $string:$string
> example string:example string

NOTE:

• Accepted characters are characters ranging from A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _.
• If not double quoted, newlines will be replaced with spaces.

Unlike POSIX, Ion also offers support for first class arrays, which are denoted with the @ sigil. The rules for these are identical, but instead of returning a single string, it will return an array of strings. This means that it's possible to use an array variable as arguments in a command, as each element in the array will be treated as a separate shell word.

$ let array = [one two three]
$ echo @array
> one two three
$ cmd @args

However, do note that double-quoted arrays are coerced into strings, with spaces separating each element. It is equivalent to using the $join(array) method. Containing multiple arrays within double quotes is therefore equivalent to folding the elements into a single string.

Braces can also be used when you need to integrate a variable expansion along accepted ASCII characters.

echo ${hello}world
echo @{hello}world

Ion also supports aliasing commands, which can be defined using the alias builtin. Aliases are often used as shortcuts to repetitive command invocations.

alias ls = "ls --color"