On 02/08/2011 10:11 PM, bearophile wrote:
Adam Ruppe:
I'm still trying to find something I like for this.
Me too.
I like Adam's solution as well, but it's not perfect. The only other solution
(like for constraints) would be a syntactic difference, but since we're limited
by keyboard keys, this would instead certainly augment visual noise.
Error messages give a line number... but if there's still several
points of similar failure on that one line, it doesn't help as much
as it could.
I understand. But splitting lines too much make the code a bit too much thin. I
think a better solution is this request (from Lewis):
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5521
Just done it for my parser. Once you get the line nr...
Maybe try ubyte[]?
There are moments when I want an array of ubytes, other moments when I want an
array of 8 bit chars, and other situations where I want a string of chars. An
ubyte[] is a workaround for a type system not good enough yet.
After some more interrogations on the topic, I think there should be 4 somewhat
related types.
* Bytes --> processing of data at plain binary/numeric level, no link to text
(eg pixmap)
* ByteString --> single-byte charset text (ascii, latin-X,...)
On the implementation side, there no difference in data structure (not even
code check like for D chars). But conceptually and semantically, these types
are unrelated. (It would be a bit strange for me to process a pixmap using a
type that exposes tons of text-processing functionality.)
ByteString is, I guess, more or less what Steven proposed.
* D' utf-8 string for i/O of unicode text without any manipulation (except
concat).
* A Text like what I proposed for unicode text manipulation, conceptually an
array of univoque text-characters (an array of no-copy-slices into a normalised
utf-8 string).
Though, on the other hand, I've used the ncurses library which does
this kind of thing. The number of function names is obscene, and
the benefit is quite small.
I agree that too many functions are going to give problems. But an "a" suffix
is burden smaller than two names fully new.
I like your proposal. But -a suffixes are no good, use -Array or array- prefix
instead.
I'm not convinced the parentheses are
a big deal. (Hell, I've done lisp before... and kinda liked it. :P)
Scala, Ruby, ML-class languages like Haskell, etc have means to reduce
parentheses count. Reducing syntax noise in functional-style code is something
that a lot of people wants (me too). I have used Scheme, but parentheses tire
me after a while.
Editors do that for you, don't they? Even for languages they don't know...
(never been annoyed by paren counts, not even in Lisp-like slangs)
Denis
--
_________________
vita es estrany
spir.wikidot.com
