Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

igo.herokuapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 94 posts

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#51

Post by CatMtKing »

georgemcbay wrote: post #45
mseepgood wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is more code on the same screen a good thing?

A lot of programmers seem to think that (the more code they can jam on the screen at a time the better, and thus any unnecessary newlines are superfluous), but I also don't understand why many are so rabid about it. We generally don't code on 80x25 character terminals anymore, super high res monitors are cheap, vertical lines in code aren't a scarce commodity. Personally I tend to like a fair amount of vertical white…

I comically interpreted your example of hi-res monitors as jamming more code on the screen at once.

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#52

Post by georgemcbay »

insertnickname wrote: post #40
todd3834 wrote: post #13

What is so wrong with curly braces?

They are annoying to type.

Maybe it is because I've been programming in for something like 24 years, but I don't find them annoying to type at all; Also, maybe I'm just slow, but my typing speed is hardly the bottleneck for me in writing code; I doubt it would be even if I typed at like 20 wpm (about 95 wpm for me, and I don't touchtype). And then lastly, you can always remap your keyboard to make {} non-shift characters and/or use a language parsing IDE/editor that auto-inserts braces.

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#54

Post by ansible »

pico303 wrote: post #10

No. Go is beautifully straightforward and blatantly obvious as to what is going on. Don't start hiding scopes behind tabs or magically creating variables referencing structs. Plus, with all these changes, this syntax saved 5 lines of code, most of which were simply closing braces, and brought no greater clarity. In fact, I'd argue it's probably pretty easy to mess up scope in the iGo example and never know it.

Go is beautifully straightforward and blatantly obvious as to what is going on.

I agree.

I've argued similarly on the Lua mailing list when someone wanted to change the comment characters used in the source code to be C-style instead of Lua style (double minus).

If you're going to change the language, really change it, and give enough benefit to make a break with existing code. If you are going to tweak something like comments (or in this case use significant whitespace), there isn't enough benefit (other than programmer preference) to justify the switch.

If nearly every gopher thought thought this was great and switched their code, then that's OK. But if you start using iGo, you're still going to be spending most of your time looking at regular Go source. So you need to learn the rules for Go and iGo, for negligible long term benefit.

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#55

Post by Crito »

mehrdada wrote: post #47
Crito wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure he means 'almost' context free (as opposed to 'very' context sensitive. C is context sensitive. A language like C++ is heavily context sensitive (actually, C++'s templates make it recursively enumerable iirc, so even worse..)). Being regular would mean that you could decide it with regular expressions. Regular expressions are insufficiently powerful for matched parentheses of arbitrary depth, which is a g…

> Being regular would mean that you could decide it with regular expressions. Hence almost regular. Of course, there is no concrete definition for "almost regular", but what I mean by it (Rob Pike himself also characterizes it as such too[1]), is that you get to decide which way to parse a construct quite definitely early in the token stream and you don't have to read arbitrary following tokens to figure out how to c…

Do you have the timestamp of when in this talk Rob Pike mentions this? If he says that it is "almost regular", then that settles it in my book, but I am pretty certain that you are wrong about most block oriented high level languages being context free.

C++ is an extreme case, as it's Turing complete, but C is definitely context sensitive (http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2007/11/24/the-context-sensitiv...), Perl is just as bad as C++ (http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393), and I can't find a link for it right now but IIRC the Java is context sensitive for some reason too.

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#56

Post by DAddYE »

Hi all,

I'd like to explain one thing, right now the `go build` etc... isn't implemented.

There is a good reason for that.

You may not want to distribute `igo` files, this `syntax` should work in the very same way of `go fmt`.

The idea is allowing you to write as you like (for me indenting) then distribute your files as you always did with `go fmt`, so the `code` will be always `.go` files formatted in the standard way, with comments as well.

That's it.

Cheers, DD

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#57

Post by moron4hire »

CatMtKing wrote: post #44
moron4hire wrote: post #28

Why is significant-whitespace vs. braces a significant issue for people? I've coded in both and while I suppose I would have to say that I'm "most" comfortable with braces, I don't find SW that different. The semantics of the code haven't changed at all. It's not like we're going from C to O'Caml here. This doesn't enable a different way of thinking about the code. I guess I just feel that, if I could run a set of ve…

Personally, it's not a significant issue, but it is a preference. Do you indent code when coding with braces? How anal are you about keeping your code formatted consistently (i.e. spaces after operators)?

Sometimes, not always. I'm likely to put a one-line getter/setter on one line.

I use formatter tools to do most of the formatting. It's nice to have formatted code, but I'm not fastidious about it. It's bound to Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D in Visual Studio. I prefix it to Ctrl+S out of habit. But if the automatic formatter can't take care of it, I don't bother changing anything. Simplicity and consistency are more important than "having my way".

Code should be readable, which is a human issue. As such, I think it's always going to have edge cases where "breaking the rules" is appropriate.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I often use the formatting as a pre-check before compiling. If the formatter doesn't format the code as I expect it to, it means I've screwed up a block somewhere. That's pretty much it for me.

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#58

Post by DAddYE »

enneff wrote: post #31
shurcooL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can write code in iGo and save it as .go. You'll never know if the code was written using Go syntax or iGo syntax, whether the person used tabs of width 4, 8, or 2 (it'll be a '\t' character in the file), or if they used Sublime Text or vim or emacs.

Oh really? So the igo code won't be checked into your repo? The comments you've made will be preserved and in the right place in the resulting code? And you'll be writing go code that other go programmers will find idiomatic and easy to read? Also, if you use igo won't you have to adjust to read other peoples non-igo code? Or will you use a converter tool whenever you read any go code?

yes, I explained more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445034

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#59

Post by enneff »

shurcooL wrote: post #36
enneff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh really? So the igo code won't be checked into your repo? The comments you've made will be preserved and in the right place in the resulting code? And you'll be writing go code that other go programmers will find idiomatic and easy to read? Also, if you use igo won't you have to adjust to read other peoples non-igo code? Or will you use a converter tool whenever you read any go code?

Yes, that's the idea. The current implementation may not be finished/perfect. > Also, if you use igo won't you have to adjust to read other peoples non-igo code? Or will you use a converter tool whenever you read any go code? "Converter tool" makes it sound like you find it unreasonable. Do people use "converter tools" to view .html files in a rendered format? No, they use a browser. Or to display '\t' characters wit…

The converter tool comment was in the context of reading code on GitHub, for example.

Re: iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang

#60

Post by frou_dh »

The experiment's upvote-worthy and I applaud the effort, but there's no chance I'll ever use this personally. In practice, I don't think I've ever been annoyed by the syntax of Go. Perhaps the one iffy behaviour has been the way multi-valued := wriggles around mixed declaration/assignment dependant on what's already in scope.
Post reply on HN