Microfeatures I'd like to see in more languages

Post by lolinder » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 1:59 AM UTC

jonasenordin wrote: post #226

keybored wrote: post #60

Agree with kebab-case. > Most languages have multiline literals, but what makes the Lua version great is that the beginning and ending marks are different characters. This solves the infuriating “unnestable quotes” problem string literals have, and you don’t have to escape all your literal \s. That paragraph also uses “nestable marks”.

Nestable comment syntax is also nice. At least some MLs (eg SML) has it, that I know of. Indentation-sensitivity can also solve similar problems. (Indentation does not have to exclude requiring graphic termination. A formal language can require both. Or just a helpful tool.) (Also agree with 'kebab-case', although the name is new to me and a bit weird.)

Post by lolinder » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:04 AM UTC

unnouinceput wrote: post #238

jbverschoor wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the link with parent, nor why + would be bad, besides a) because language is naive about concatenation / allocation, and b) if the language allows / doesn't differentiate between a char 'x' and an integer, bc that would result in an integer addition instead of a concatenation.

If you manipulate strings in code using "+" (string concatenation symbol) from a user input you'd be in a world of hurt where you either do a lot of regex (which is ugly and unmaintainable) or you limit the user input to known characters only (which would be a bad user experience and later on your manager would ask you to lift such constraint anyway because they want to support a new feature from now on). Therefore y…

Post by jodrellblank » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:17 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #182

dariusj18 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perl has so much syntactic sugar it's the poster child for syntactic diabetes, really.

Post by ilyt » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:34 AM UTC

feoren wrote: post #163

lalaithion wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have two functions abracadabra(foo) and foo.abracadabra() which do different things , you should rename one of those functions tbh.

The problem is when you have the functions: Square.computeArea() Circle.computeArea() Clearly these should do different things. I suppose "computeArea(shape)" does dynamic dispatch based on the type of shape? But you're still putting every function defined on every type in your entire codebase in a global namespace. It's not obviously awful but I'd definitely be a bit nervous about it.

Post by ilyt » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 2:36 AM UTC

onei wrote: post #9

xigoi wrote: post #4

My favorite is uniform function call syntax. In several languages (Nim, Koka, D, …), you can always write bar.foo(baz) instead of foo(bar, baz) and vice-versa. Another one from Nim is the implicit result variable. Instead of having to do this: func sum(nums: seq[int]): int = var result = 0 for num in nums: result += num return result you just do this: func sum(nums: seq[int]): int = for num in nums: result += num It…

I think you can also do the second in Go with named returns, e.g. func sum(nums []int) (result int) { for _, n := range nums { result += n } } No clue if it's an idiomatic usage, and named returns always felt a little too magic for me.

    func sum(nums []int) (result int) {
        for _, n := range nums {
            result += n
        }
        return
    }

    return result