[vidarh]

The point was that logically it would be an array lookup by index.

There's no need for any conditional construct here whatsoever.

You'll note it has already constructed a string in the right order to do that, but then copped out with the if-else.

[e12e]

True enough. On that note, I had a look at the language reference - there's arrays - but also this:

    (char_at s index)        # Get ASCII value at index (0-based)
    (string_from_char code)  # Create string from ASCII value

So, you can pluck a character... From an UTF-8 string? What if the rendering used multibyte characters?

[vidarh]

Well, we can see the string, and we can see that is uses plain ASCII.

[e12e]

In this case, sure. But what if we shifted to rendering with emojis or whatnot. What would the first ASCII character of the string be?

[vidarh]

If you anticipate that need, you just store the gradient as an array of strings, and you still then only need a trivial lookup.

[e12e]

I was more commenting on the language design here; the idea of indexing into a UTF-8 string and returning an ASCII character. What does the index count? Bytes? There doesn't seem to be a way to get UTF-8 characters from strings?

Ed: There seems to be an UTF-8 library:

https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/tree/main/modules/...