Variable types

Variables and values covers the basics: create a variable with $name = value, and Rhyme figures out its type from whatever you assign. This page goes one level deeper — the full set of value kinds Rhyme recognizes, and exactly what to write to get each one.

You don’t declare a type up front. Rhyme looks at the shape of the value on the right-hand side of = and figures out what kind of value it is automatically. Knowing what shape produces what kind of value helps you predict how a variable will behave — for example, whether $time = 14:30 gives you a real time value you can compare and sort, or just a piece of text.

Copying another variable

$bar = $foo

Assigning one variable to another copies its current value — and with it, whatever kind of value that already is. There’s no conversion here: if $foo holds a number, $bar becomes a number too; if $foo holds text, $bar becomes text. It isn’t fixed by the syntax — it depends entirely on what $foo holds at the time of assignment.

Text

$greet = "Hello"

Anything in double quotes is text — words, sentences, labels, formatted strings. Same as covered in Variables and values.

Number

$age = 42

A bare numeric literal — digits, optionally with a decimal point — is a number. No quotes, no suffix.

Time of day

$time = 14:30

Write a bare hour:minute value (24-hour, optionally with a 12-hour am/pm suffix like 2:30pm) and Rhyme treats it as a real time value — one you can compare and sort — not just text that happens to look like a time.

This is different from writing a quoted "14:30", which is stored as plain text (see Dates and times). Both are valid; pick whichever fits your use case — text for straightforward display and storage, an unquoted time if you need Rhyme to treat it as an actual point in time.

Date

$date = 2024-03-20

Write a bare year-month-day value and Rhyme treats it as a real date value, the same way it treats an unquoted time. As with times, this is distinct from writing a quoted "2024-03-20", which is stored as plain text (see Dates and times) — same shape, different kind of value depending on whether it’s quoted.

Duration

$duration = 10m

A number immediately followed by a unit (ms, s/sec, m/min/minute, h/hour, d/day, w/week) becomes a duration. Rhyme converts it to milliseconds under the hood — 10m becomes 600000. That converted millisecond value is what gets stored and compared, not the original 10m text.

Caution

month and year are accepted as duration units, but the conversion to milliseconds isn’t wired up for them yet — a duration like 1year will silently compute to 0. Stick to week or smaller until this is fixed.

Block reference

$block = [test-block]

Square brackets containing a lowercase-starting name become a block reference — pointing at a named block elsewhere in your app, not a list. Square brackets starting with an uppercase letter, a digit, a quote, or $ give you an array/list instead, so the case of that first character matters.

Item

$item = {name: Bob, age: 30}

Curly braces define an item — a structured value with named fields, similar to a row from a connected sheet.

Dotted field access and assignment

$item.foo = 55

You can read or set an individual field with dot notation. $item itself stays an item; the field you just set (foo) gets its own kind of value based on what you assigned it — here, a plain number. Assign a field a quoted string instead and that field would hold text, and so on — each field follows the same rules as a top-level variable.

Quick reference

For completeness, here are the same examples alongside Rhyme’s internal type names — the labels you may occasionally see surface in error messages or debugging output. You don’t need to know these to write Rhyme; the plain-English descriptions above are what matter day to day.

Assign	Kind of value	Internal type name
$bar = $foo	same as $foo	(depends on $foo)
$greet = "Hello"	text	TEXT
$age = 42	number	NUMBER
$block = [test-block]	block reference	BLOCKNAME
$time = 14:30	time value	DT_TIMEONLY
$date = 2024-03-20	date value	DT_DATEONLY
$duration = 10m	duration, stored as 600000	DT_DURATION
$item = {name: Bob, age: 30}	item	ITEM
$item.foo = 55	item, with foo as a number	ITEM (field: NUMBER)