“Swift is the only language I could find with over 100 keywords”

Post by addicted » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 5:08 AM UTC

igouy wrote: post #20

philwelch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS is a fairly low bar to compare other programming languages to.

And used by many, so useful to compare to?

Post by igouy » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 5:26 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #21

igouy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And used by many, so useful to compare to?

It’s only used by many because it’s the only scripting language on the web browser, and not due to anything intrinsic to the language. So it’s popularity tells us nothing about the language, and more about the fact that it’s the only language on the most popular platform. So I’m not sure comparing any language to JS is useful to learn about the language.

Post by xedrac » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

kevincox wrote: post #18

xedrac wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All special forms (if, let, progv, etc...) are very similar to keywords in other languages. But there's only a couple dozen of them. From Wikipedia: "Some Lisp control structures are special operators, equivalent to other languages' syntactic keywords."

Personally I don't think that really counts. IIUC you can override those names, so they aren't reserved, and you can implement any one of these as a macro so you don't need to remember anything outside of the core language. (You can't implement them all as macros, but IIRC there are disjoint built-in sets that can give you the full behaviour)