Re: special forms, take two (was Re: A lua version of "amb")

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 6:16 AM, Jay Carlson <nop@nop.com> wrote:
> But Unix programmers are allergic to backslash being used that way.
> Even though my brain says "yes, lots of languages write lambda as
> backslash" my eyes say "control character".

So \\x(x+1) would read better? ;)

> of describing what I had in mind: string indexing is a partial
> function from strings to characters.

There's also the Go approach, where iterating over a UTF-8 string
returns 'runes' rather than the underlying bytes.

> My favorite lombok-so-bad-it's-good trick is how their implicitly
> typed Java "var s = new HashSet()" is syntactically legal.

I abuse the helpfulness of Eclipse by writing the same and using the
correct feature to quickly fill in the actual type.

> optional static typing all of a sudden makes dynamic languages much
> heavier

The approach in Koneki is to encourage people to provide types in the
@param tags.

steve d.