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Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?

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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?

#41

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #10

A lot of different stuff: The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features. DSLs have fallen out of favor. Javascript took over for a bit (although I believe that is receding.) LtU was a great place for about a decade when the internet was getting going, moving language discussions out of the mailing lists, which were pretty isolated, and in…

> The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features.

And the popular languages still don't have sensible macros, with the exception of Rust...

Once upon a time they had very complicated macro facilities: not just Lisp, the assembly of the S390 had one, etc. etc. Then came C with its incomplete #define thing, and the whole concept came into disrepute...

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?

#43

Post by PaulHoule »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #37
spinningslate wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is no fun writing external DSLs when you're stuck with your grandfather's parser generator. Agreed. I've tried various different approaches to building external DSLs, from fully hand-written to language workbenches like xtext [0] and spoofax [1]. I always end up back at hand written, often because of error handling. Creating meaningfully helpful error handling with parser generators always seems hard. >If we had…

> Grammar composition is hard. Composing grammars may not be possible, but it's easy to define a new grammar that provides the composition of two other grammars along with boilerplate that serves the purpose of determining whether you're in a "grammar A" context or a "grammar B" context. You just need tokens that aren't valid in grammar A or grammar B. No statement in such a grammar would be valid in either subgramma…

It drives people nuts but I say there are many characters in Unicode

https://unicode-table.com/en/sets/quotation-marks/

if you need a new kind of quote, so you could write

   Integer index = 77;
   Statement s = « SELECT COUNT(*) FROM that WHERE x = @index »;
People ask me "How do you type those on the keyboard?" and I say, "I don't type them on the keyboard, I cut and paste them." I use >128 codepoints all the time and mostly I don't need to because autocomplete works with them. No reason you can't write

   out.println(√(41.0))

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?

#45

Post by lproven »

PaulHoule wrote: post #43
thaumasiotes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Grammar composition is hard. Composing grammars may not be possible, but it's easy to define a new grammar that provides the composition of two other grammars along with boilerplate that serves the purpose of determining whether you're in a "grammar A" context or a "grammar B" context. You just need tokens that aren't valid in grammar A or grammar B. No statement in such a grammar would be valid in either subgramma…

It drives people nuts but I say there are many characters in Unicode https://unicode-table.com/en/sets/quotation-marks/ if you need a new kind of quote, so you could write Integer index = 77; Statement s = « SELECT COUNT(*) FROM that WHERE x = @index »; People ask me "How do you type those on the keyboard?" and I say, "I don't type them on the keyboard, I cut and paste them." I use >128 codepoints all the time and mo…

I suggest learning to use the Compose key. For instance with no clipboard use at all, it enables «this».

Compose++>

Also see “curly” quotes: compose++". This illustrates the power of composing: I had forgotten the shortcut, because I rarely use it, but I was able to guess it in 3 tries.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?

#46

Post by syntor »

BalinKing wrote: post #15
richdougherty wrote: post #7

I used to love reading this site, but haven't in a long time. The only other place I know that discusses PL stuff is https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/ . The discussion there's not always high quality, but sometimes there are interesting topics. Does anyone know of any other good places where PL theory and topics are are discussed?

It's not centralized, but I see a fair bit of discussion on Twitter by following the researchers in the area.

Do you have any recommendations?
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