Re: Why Ruby?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2010-12-19 16:23, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 12/19/10 6:26 AM, retard wrote:
Sat, 18 Dec 2010 16:01:37 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
Simen kjaeraas wrote:
The problem of D's lambda syntax is it is optimized for longer
functions. Usually, the delegates I write are one line long. I cannot
see that this syntax collides with anything at the moment, but feel
free to enlighten me:

{ => 4; }
{ a => 2*a; }
{ a, b => a>b; }
{ => @ + @; } // turns into { a, b => a + b; }


If size and simplicity of typing are critical, are those really better
than:

"a>b"

In case you didn't see, two additional problems were also listed earlier
in this thread:

- template bloat (different strings generate new instances of the sort
in the sorting example)

This can be solved by using a canonicalizer before passing to unaryFun.
I considered doing that, but delayed implementing it to when this would
actually become a problem.

I can clearly see that you haven't used an Objective-C/D bridge. The 
reason (or at least one of the reasons) for which Michel Fortin (as well 
as I) gave up the Objective-C/D bridge and started to modify DMD is 
template bloat. I'm not saying that using template strings as lambdas is 
going to bloat your executable/library as much as the bridge does but I 
always think twice before adding a template to my code.

- symbol visibility problems because of wrong scoping

Scoping is not wrong, it's just different :o). I agree that that can be
an issue - in which case you take the enormous hit of writing (a, b) {
stmts }, of which the proposals passionately discussed within save a
grand total of around four characters.

I don't know why but you added the {} characters.

Again: to what extent does this help on becoming able to do what you
want to do in D, and where is implementing this ranked in comparison to
the other work items?


Andrei
--
/Jacob Carlborg