Microfeatures I'd like to see in more languages

Post by masklinn » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:44 PM UTC

dariusj18 wrote: post #171

turtledragonfly wrote: post #2

With regard to strings, they give a good example in Lua, but oh boy wait until this person hears about Perl (: There's a whole section in the manual [1] for string quoting operators (qq, qw, qx, ...) In general, I feel like Perl is one of those languages that has a high amount of these "quality of life" syntactic features, and helps make it enjoyable to write, once you get over the learning curve. [1] https://perldoc…

That's actually a great point. Perl has so many syntactic sugars that it is a poster child for too much variety in ways you can write things. Making it much harder to read someone else's code.

Post by philsnow » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:45 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #79

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #47

Negative array subscripts. So a[-1] means the last element of an array, a[-2] means the second last, and so on.

Any language that supports overriding the index operation should support this. You should be able to do this in C# with a struct with a backing array, for instance. If you're going to do this, use the word "Circular" in it, and I would also insist that if a has 4 elements, then a[0] == a[4] == a[8]. In other words, you always just take the (positive) index modulo the size of the area. Then a[-1] is the same as a[N-1]…

  for (uint8 i = 247; i++;) {
    // print circ_arr[i]
  }

  i    circ_arr[i]
  247  247
  248  248
  249  249
  250  250
  251  1   # 251 % 250 = 0
  252  2   # 252 % 250 = 1
  253  3   # ...
  254  4
  255  5
  0    1   # i overflows to 0
  1    2
  ...

Post by ivan_gammel » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:49 PM UTC

  class Foo { 
    @Max(10) int bar;
    @NonNull String name();
  }

  var field = @Foo::bar;
  var max = @Foo::bar.Max;
  var method = @Foo::name;
  var foo = new Foo();
  var name = method(foo);
  var bar = foo.field;

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:53 PM UTC

wging wrote: post #28

pgorczak wrote: post #12

Clojure’s loop expression hits this spot for me. It sets a recursion point to which you can jump using any logic inside the body you want, as long as it is from tail position. It’s like a while loop turned into an expression. I haven’t encountered any other way to write iterative expressions whose number of iterations isn’t known at the top (like map and reduce).

Tail call optimization can get you that, too. If you've written Scheme and/or gone through SICP you might be familiar with this: you write a recursive function, with the recursive function call as the last thing the function does ('tail-recursion'), and the compiler/runtime is able to optimize those recursive calls out rather than consuming one stack frame of space per call ('tail call optimization'). Clojure has loo…

Post by 4ad » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:56 PM UTC

maxbond wrote: post #32

4ad wrote: post #15

> Instead of writing 10000500, you can write 10_000_500, or 1_00_00_500 if you’re Indian. I hate this so much. It means I can't grep for a constant.

If you have constants repeated throughout the codebase, you can pull them into a constants file, and then you can go to that file, navigate to the definition of interest, and use your IDE of choice to find usages. You'll also be able to give these constants semantically significant names, and comment next to them providing derivations or citations. And of course, if it's a mistaken or outdated value, you can change i…