On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Kartik Agaram <a...@akkartik.com> wrote:
> Also, has there been discussion of the haskell approach?
>
> a) Explicitly mark certain ops as infix. That would eliminate a lot of
> curlies, and also allow any op to be infix.
>
> b) Allow any op to be temporarily infix by enclosing it in backticks
> or something like that. Maybe curlies?
>
> matrix1 {convolve} matrix2
>
Yes, it has been discussed, in the "inline default" mode, you use
/operator/ to convert temporarily to an infix operator.
> ---
>
> My major concern with curly infix is that it introduces an extra layer
> of indirection. Say you're trying to track down a bug in evaluation:
>
> i) Lisp is extremely direct. All the parens are visible, directly
> permitting reasoning about evaluation.
> ii) An indentation-sensitive lisp like wart requires mentally
> inserting parens to make sure we aren't accidentally wrapping
> something we didn't mean to.
> iii) Curly infix requires converting indentation to curly infix and
> then *removing* the curly infix to convert to prefix.
>
> I'm sure these issues have been done to death on this list, and
> they're probably not on top of your todo lists before the deadline.
> Feel free to point me at the mailing list archives :)
Refer to this page instead: http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/version02.html
In particular, dwheeler tried out various approaches to infix, and
soon found that, to his surprise, non-explicit infix is *less* useful.
In fact, consider a complicated expression in C:
if((cond1 && cond2) || (cond3 && cond4 && cond5)) ...
While I know for a fact that && bind tighter than ||, I won't be
comfortable writing it out as cond1 && cond2 || cond3 && cond4 &&
cond5 - I still group them. So the basic insight in comparing
infix-default and curly-infix is that as infix expressions get more
complicated, you *are* going to group them anyway, so you might as
well grit your teeth and group them now while they're still simple.
Sincerely,
AmkG
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