Pointless
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Pointless
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Re: Pointless
#2This is pretty cool. After reading half the examples, I started wondering "wait what are you doing with the output variable", and then it clicked and I checked the docs, and yep, outputting to stdout is done by assignment to a magic `output` variable. A very interesting/novel approach to things.
Re: Pointless
#3How would you describe the difference between an Object and a Map in Pointless?
Having read the documentation, I don't see any difference other than whether non-string keys are allowed, and as a result the syntax for value access (`obj.key` vs `map["key"]`).
And one of the things I've been wondering about with regard to language design is why more languages don't take a Clojure-like approach of fully merging the concept of "object" and "map", since they seem to cover so much of the same ground.
Re: Pointless
#4looks a lot like f#
Re: Pointless
#5This is pretty cool. After reading half the examples, I started wondering "wait what are you doing with the output variable", and then it clicked and I checked the docs, and yep, outputting to stdout is done by assignment to a magic `output` variable. A very interesting/novel approach to things.
Haskell is somewhat similar, too! I think some of this comes from C.
The goal of a Haskell compiler is to take your code and spit out an executable. That executable is in fact the value named “Main.main,” which must be of the in-Haskell type (translating to English) “a program which produces nothing.” In the source code you are constantly juggling values of type “a program which produces ____” and linking them together with the in-built methods, to get to this point, and the compiler just takes one of these things, based on a naming convention, and spits it out to the filesystem. And I think it got this convention because it was really handy how C similarly used a well-known name to specify its entry point into the source file.
The difference is then that Pointless does not have a type restriction on what “main” can be and instead of “saving to the filesystem” it dumps to stdout. Presumably with the right sort of metaprogramming attitude one could do what Haskell does in Pointless, maybe—when output is a program it could maybe spit out a compiled executable to stdout and you would redirect it to a disk location and set its executable permission manually.
Re: Pointless
#6How would you describe the difference between an Object and a Map in Pointless? Having read the documentation, I don't see any difference other than whether non-string keys are allowed, and as a result the syntax for value access (`obj.key` vs `map["key"]`). And one of the things I've been wondering about with regard to language design is why more languages don't take a Clojure-like approach of fully merging the conc…
Hello, I'm the author of this project: Pointless originally had a static type-system, which I later ditched (the type-system was pretty experimental, and I never got it working to my liking). So the object / map division is a holdover from that. I'll probably keep them separate for now to leave the option of static typing open, but I agree that it's a bit redundant for now. The only remaining technical differences are that maps can have other types like numbers and labels as keys, and objects can include function definitions.
Re: Pointless
#7How would you describe the difference between an Object and a Map in Pointless? Having read the documentation, I don't see any difference other than whether non-string keys are allowed, and as a result the syntax for value access (`obj.key` vs `map["key"]`). And one of the things I've been wondering about with regard to language design is why more languages don't take a Clojure-like approach of fully merging the conc…
Possibly because JS did that (it has been a thing since Self I think? Or maybe that was just the prototypal inheritance—I never can remember) and the confusion between the symbolic properties and the key properties kept coming up. Like, you have that x.abc is the same as x["abc"] but then things start to break because many dict objects have a .__proto__ or whatever and so they start to fail in interesting ways when you allow users to store their own strings in the keys and they overwrite something you were using later on.
JS now has a dedicated Map type to work as a proper dictionary.
Re: Pointless
#8This is pretty cool. After reading half the examples, I started wondering "wait what are you doing with the output variable", and then it clicked and I checked the docs, and yep, outputting to stdout is done by assignment to a magic `output` variable. A very interesting/novel approach to things.
Actually, something like this has been routinely done at the low level, especially when programming in assembly. (Also, trivially done in C++.)
Re: Pointless
#9This is pretty cool. After reading half the examples, I started wondering "wait what are you doing with the output variable", and then it clicked and I checked the docs, and yep, outputting to stdout is done by assignment to a magic `output` variable. A very interesting/novel approach to things.
Anyone remember the SNOBOL set of languages?
Re: Pointless
#10This is pretty cool. After reading half the examples, I started wondering "wait what are you doing with the output variable", and then it clicked and I checked the docs, and yep, outputting to stdout is done by assignment to a magic `output` variable. A very interesting/novel approach to things.
Anyone remember the SNOBOL set of languages?
Familiar but without hands-on experience. Read some reference manuals on it and code samples.
I recognized right away that the span and break pattern-matching operators of Snobol must be the inspiration behind C library names like strspn and strpbrk.