Adelle Hartley wrote:
> From the short list of programming languages that I'm familiar with,
> all of them that I can think of, use parentheses to mark the beginning
> and end of a list of parameters to a function,
> eg.
> DoSomething(param1, param2);
>
> Are there many programming languages in which the parentheses may be
> omitted when calling a function under certain circumstances, such as the
> parameter list having zero parameters, or the function has a specific
> semantic property (such as being a property accessor)?
Ocaml has a syntax which is completely different to all of the
languages descended from Algol (Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Python,
Ada and so on) and calling a function called DoSomething with
two parameters is written as:
DoSomething param1 param2 ;
Haskell has similar syntax in this regard.
> A related question: which programming languages allow me to replace the
> declaration of a variable with a parameterless function, without also
> doing a search & replace for each instance where the variable is used?
I don't think there is one. The problem is, how would you specify the
difference between a constant and a function with no parameters?
In Ocaml you would have:
let pi = 4.0 *. atan 1.0 (* This is a constant. *)
let func () =
print_endline "Hello"
To call the function with no parameters you would do:
func () ;
I hope this helps and I'm really curious about these rather odd
questions :-).
Cheers,
Erik
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Erik de Castro Lopo
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Copyrighting allows people to benefit from their labours,
but software patents allow the companies with the largest
legal departments to benefit from everyone else's work."
-- Andrew Brown
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1387575,00.html)
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