So, I just made another post which is the main address to Terrence's post; I'm
just going to have a single format.
Terrence Brannon wrote:
this will create a Tower of Babel situation I think. It's nice to try to
appease the masses, but having two things which are very similar but
slightly different is an issue. One from a learning perspective. Two
from dealing with other people's work that you need to extend.
Right, so now I'm just going to pick one.
While no one requested this change, part of the motivation comes
from feedback I got a couple weeks ago from a Python user who
thought the syntax looked too Perlish for them,
I see and they were specific about what was too Perlish?
No they weren't. But from my past experience in language comparison
discussions, the presence/lack of sigils was one of the biggest points, so I
made an educated guess that this change may have significant appeasement value.
it looks like you are getting good crowd reaction from those people, so
I would go with the Python/SQL approach as standard.
Well, seeming from a total of 2 people so far.
You are reaching Java levels of verboseness if you cant declare and
assign in a single line. that's a major turn-off for Python/Perl types.
Maybe not DBA types.
In some ways I see this as not such a big deal because arguably from a huffman
standpoint, the amount of code that actually *has* any variables would be
relatively rare. Basically, the only time you ever deal with lexical variables
is if you have direct user I/O (or when you fetch the current date or a random
number), and most database-concerning code doesn't, but my quoted example did.
Practically all normal database-using code is purely atomic, and just fakes
variables with named expression nodes (the ::= versus the := infixes), and you
do always declare a named expression node in the same line that you define its
value.
On the other hand, if people use Muldis D a lot in ways beyond what SQL is used
for, there'd probably be more use of variables and more use of the shorthand.
Another thing to note is that in Muldis D all variables implicitly are defaulted
to the default value of their declared types, so if that's the initial value you
want, you don't have to explicitly initialize it at all. For strings this is
the empty string, and so on.
A "$>foo" is meant to be a mnemonic shorthand for a "foo => $foo",
and hence ">foo" is short for "foo => foo". It is analogous to the
":$foo" of Perl 6 being short for "foo => $foo".
oh that's a nice shorthand now that I know what it means :)
I think so too.
-- Darren Duncan
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