On Wednesday, 16 July 2014 at 10:22:41 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2aruaf/dconf_2014_keynote_high_performance_code_using_d/
Despite Walter is used to "pipeline programming", so the next
step is to also handle failures and off-band messages in a
functional way (without exceptions and global error values)
with two "parallel pipelines", here named "Railway-Oriented
Programming". This is one of the simplest introductions (and he
can skip the slides 19-53) that I have found of this topic
(that in the Haskell community is explained on the base of
monads):
http://www.slideshare.net/ScottWlaschin/railway-oriented-programming
In Bugzilla there are already requests for some
Railway-Oriented Programming:
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6840
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6843
I think no language extensions are needed for such kind of
programming, but of course built-in tuple syntax and basic
forms of pattern matching in switch
(https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=596 ) improve
the syntax and make the code more handy, handy enough to push
more D programmers in using it.
For some examples of those things in a system language, this
page shows some little examples of functional syntax for Rust:
http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-programmers.html
Bye,
bearophile
I think that approach is more convincing for functional languages
than for D, especially if you are limited to a single return type.
Why not just follow the use Unix stdout/stderr model, and provide
an OutputRange for errors to be sent to?
I don't really believe that there are two 'railway tracks' in the
sense that that presentation implies. Once an error has occurred,
typically not much more pipeline processing happens. As for Unix,
stdout from one step is tied to stdin, but stderr is output only.
There may be further processing of the stderr stream (eg, errors
may be reported to a database), but the steps are completely
independent from the main stdin-stdout track. I think you get a
messy design if you try to combine both into a single pipeline.
I think it could be quite interesting to see which algorithms can
be created with an Error OutputRange model.
