On Tuesday, 20 February 2018 at 12:15:57 UTC, psychoticRabbit
wrote:
I've noticed that Go and Rust annotate functions.
func (in go)
fn (in rust)
I was kind of wondering why they made that choice, given
compilers in many languages do not.
A lot of dynamic languages do too
def foo(): # python
function foo() {} // javascript
etc.
I suspect a good chunk of it is just to make it look more
familiar to them. It might also have been so they can hack up
"goto definition" features in editors without a real parser...
Everything else seems to have an annotation (e.g structs,
classes.) So why not functions?
The reason is just that we don't need it - the pattern of code
makes it quite obvious to the compiler what is and isn't a
function.
But like someone else said, we can already optionally tag stuff.
Two ways:
enum Function;
@Function void foo()
or a simple comment:
/// function foo
void foo() {}
We also have various goto definition features from parsers. In
fact, I added something for this to my editor just this last
saturday.
It is a macro that runs "doc2 --locate-symbol=name.here -" and
pipes the current source code to it, then goes to the line it
returns.
There's also `dmd -X` and `dscanner` both of which can read a
list of files you give it and find a definition. (mine is
different in two ways: 1) it looks up in scope and can do
fully-qualified names and 2) it works with pipes instead of
written files, so it can parse on demand)
$ cat simpledisplay.d | ~/program/d-diff/doc2 --locate-symbol
SimpleWindow.impl -
2018
and, of course, 2018 is the line where impl is introduced. impl
is a mixin template btw - so the parser approach works on more
than just functions!
