The Text Format section of the Core Specification provides technical descriptions for common language concepts such as values, types, and instructions. These are important concepts to know and understand if you're planning on building tooling for WebAssembly, but not necessary if you just plan on using it in your applications. That being said, the text format is an important part of WebAssembly, so there are concepts you should be aware of. In this section, we will dig into some of the details of the text format and highlight important points from the Core Specification.
To understand Wat, let's start with the first sentence of the description taken directly from the WebAssembly Core Specification:
"The textual format for WebAssembly modules is a rendering of their abstract syntax into S-expressions."
So what are symbolic expressions (S-expressions)? S-expressions are notations for nested list (tree-structured) data. Essentially, they provide a simple and elegant...