Re: OOBit

[Tim Mensch <tim-lua-l@...>]

 On 9/29/2010 8:36 PM, Sean Conner wrote:

> >  I don't know exactly why, but I would bet a nickel that the "colon
> >   call" is part of the equation.
>
>  I doubt that.  Look at PHP and all the horrible inconsistencies it
>  has (equality testing [1], inconsistent function naming and
>  parameter order, single name space for the longest time, the use of
>  '\' to denote name spaces in contrast to every other langauge out
>  there) and yet people who otherwise wouldn't (or shouldn't) program,
>  program.


PHP sucks; no question. Your point of "batteries included" is a big part 
of it, along with the fact that it's distributed with Apache (you said 
"distributed with PHP," but I knew what you meant ;).

Unfortunately, I think the C-like (and therefore Java- and 
Javascript-like) syntax of PHP is the other piece of the puzzle of its 
extreme popularity. As Steve Yegge said, the "next big language" is 
going to have a C-style syntax. [1] And I agree with him, as much as I 
like (and will continue to use and promote) Lua.

>  I also don't buy the "newbies will be confused by this" argument;
>  anyone can get used to anything if they work at it.  I knew of a
>  professional Bridge player [3][4] who wrote a Bridge program in 8088
>  assembly [5] because that's all he had at the time (and frankly, I
>  don't know any programmers who *like* 8088 Assembly (that is, if
>  they're familiar with it) because it's all special cases).


I'm not talking about newbies. At 13 I figured out Z-80 assembly 
language and wrote a game on the TRS-80. So what?

I'm talking about handing my game to a producer/designer and saying, 
"OK, go script me a dozen more levels like this." Peter points out that 
a purpose-build mini language would be the thing to use, and I agree. 
But I hate to slow down my whole game by using one of the dot syntax 
forms (__call or coroutines) to access objects, so I need to go to the 
other extreme and make sure that everything that's a call uses a colon.

And you know what? I can guarantee that producer/designer is STILL going 
to make mistakes and use a dot, if anything in the game, ever, uses a 
dot for access (to get values, for example). And then it's going to 
crash, and he's not going to know why.

>  So, if I understand this, what you would like is that any function
>  defined in a table automatically receives its table as the "self"
>  argument when called.  So, in OOLua (for lack of a better name):


No, you didn't understand. At least you missed an important point:

>  foo = { bar = function(x) self.x = x return x end , x = 0 }
>  print(foo.x) foo.bar(3) print(foo.x)


Defined this way, foo.bar(3) would fail with "attempt to index a 
number," because it's being defined with "function" instead of "method" 
or whatever the other keyword is supposed to be. The other ambiguities 
were things that he presented, and are worth discussing.

>  The other half of this argument is changing the ":" to some other
>  character or sequence of characters to make it visually distinctive
>  from the ".".  I personally don't mind the ':', and would prefer it
>  remain the ':' but I guess I could get used to it being '->' but I
>  wouldn't like it.


The OP was mostly concerned with "just making dot work," and I feel 
that's the most elegant solution. Some folks objected to "->", and 
frankly it's not pretty -- and though it does satisfy the "make it 
different" criteria, I don't know that it would satisfy the "make it 
easier for non-experts" criteria, since they still have to understand 
the underlying semantics of when to use it.

Tim

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html