Viewing profile — jcparkyn

Agent loops (particularly coding agents) have a huge amount of repetition, because the entire context is included in every model request. So long as it's at the start of the input …

> If standard defined that left subexpression of addition is fully evaluated before the right expression that wouldn't be allowed. I'm no expert, but surely this would still be all…

Honestly having looked at the memcached clients available for Java recently, I don't think any of the options could be considered feature-complete. None of the main ones support th…

In the programs I write probably about 80-90% of variables are immutable, and I think this probably corresponds to most other code. Except in certain domains and programming styles…

This is a little bit tricky because the parser has to distinguish between: for x in arr (something ()) \ /-- function call and for x in arr (something ()) \ /-- loop body This is c…

This is similar but not quite the same as persistent data structures. In particular: - We can avoid quite a few allocations in loops by mutating lists/dicts in place if we hold an …

> How to pass a mutable reference into a function, so that it can change the underlying value and the caller can observe these changes? Just modify the value inside the function an…

This applies everywhere, and it fundamentally wouldn't be possible for just function calls. > needless cost Are you comparing to a language with mutable references or a our functio…

Personally I think local mutability is quite a useful property, which was part of the inspiration for making this instead of just another pure functional language: - All functions …

> can you take the address of a variable in some way? I intentionally didn't add this, mostly because I wanted to explore how far you can get without it (and keep the language simp…

Nope, it's value semantics (unlike Python), the references are just an internal optimization. Implicit copies happen when a list/dict with more than one reference is mutated.

It's only semantically a pass-by-value, in reality a reference is passed and the data is only copied if needed (i.e. value is mutated while shared).

> Have you benchmarked any real workloads? Nothing "real", just the synthetic benchmarks in the ./benchmarks dir. Unnecessary copies are definitely a risk, and there's certain code…

> Use immutable pass by reference. Make a copy only if mutability is requested in the thread. This is essentially what Herd does. It's only semantically a pass by value, but the sa…

Yes, if you modify a nested dict/list entry, all nodes above it will be cloned. Here's an example: x = [1, [2]]; var y = x; set y.[0] = 3; // clones the outer array, keeps a refere…

Thanks, I updated the post title based on this and another comment. Thanks for the pointer to Euphoria too, looks like an interesting language with a lot of similar ideas.

Not everything in C is pass-by-value. Sure, you can argue that a pointer itself is passed by value, but the data it points to is definitely not.

I'm not sure if I understand the question? There are two ways to define a variable binding: x = 1; // declares x as immutable var y = 2; // declares y as mutable The "default" beha…

Thanks, some interesting reading there that I will check out (I wasn't aware of PCF). Perhaps I should've used more precise wording: "All types are value types". > Standard ML [...…

This is a hobby project of mine that I started a few years ago to learn about programming language implementation. It was created 95% without AI, although a few recent commits incl…

> The whole point of names is that they aren't descriptive I actually agree with this, but that's exactly the opposite of what TFA is arguing.

One of my previous side projects used this idea in the extreme: It's a two-player online word game (scrabble with some twists) but all the state is stored in the URL so it doesn't …

Not to mention tracepoints (logging breakpoints), which are functionally the same as printf but don't require compiling/restarting.

> I think if you [...] and have some luck you will succeed no matter what Ignoring the politics of it, this wording is pretty funny to me.

To be fair, this is the first thing that comes up when I google search for "DuPont connector" (after some sponsored shopping links).