On 26.07.2010 3:57, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Jul 24, 2010, at 11:51 AM, Mark S. Miller wrote:
On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Oliver Hunt <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Jul 23, 2010, at 10:32 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:
> On Jul 23, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
>
> [Good point about LL(∞) snipped.]
>
>> * To give you an idea of how important parsing is, the 280
North folk once told me that parsing made up 25% of the load time
for 280 Slides.
>
> Ollie, was that with browser-side Objective-J compilation, or
with the server translating and feeding the Obj-J-lowered-to-JS
code to the browser?
I believe it was with the browser being passed preprocessed
source, but i'll harass them to find out.
> I have polled audiences at talks in the last year about shorter
function syntax, see first two links at
http://brendaneich.com/presentations/. Results mainly for fun but
somewhat informative (to me at any rate) were not resoundingly in
favor of a new and much shorter keyword to use instead of function.
>
> This was before
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:shorter_function_syntax
was proposed, so I didn't ask the audiences to clap for its # syntax.
>
> People like the expression-closure idea, although syntax needs
to be hammered out. See
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/new_in_javascript_1.8#Expression_closures_%28Merge_into_own_page.2fsection%29
I personally am not too fussed about the reduced typing -- if
people really wanted reduced typing we could simply adopt "\"
which seems to be the common symbol used for a function.
The reason I prefer "#" to "\" is simply that JavaScript source text
[fragments] frequently appear in literal strings. Right now, the only
quoting hazard this introduced is quotes and backslashes in nested
literal strings. (Is this true?). If you use backslash in syntax
elsewhere in the language, then it becomes an additional quoting
hazard that's easy to miss.
+1 on "#".
Good point about the escaping hazard. I think # may look funny to
people because it is a "noisy" symbol and also because it is a comment
delimiter in many languages. Two other characters totally disallowed
in the syntax are @ and `, I wonder if either of those would be more
visually pleasing:
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( #(x) {x * x} )
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( `(x) {x * x} )
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( @(x) {x * x} )
I also wonder if using a strictly binary operator might be workable
without creating syntax ambiguities:
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( ^(x) {x * x} )
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( *(x) {x * x} )
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( %(x) {x * x} )
I kind of like ` but it may be too visually subtle and may be
confusing to lisp users. @ seems less visually harsh than #. I like ^
for resemblance to lambda, overall visual weight, and alignment with
Apple's "blocks" extension to C[1]. I have a vague memory that we
discussed ^ before and discarded it, but I can't find that discussion
in the archives at the moment.
Is it RegExp? Or ASCII-art maybe? Or modern smiles? Looking on all this,
I already think that old "function" is not so bad.
The thing is not to invent some "cool" symbol for that. The thing is to
make convenient short notation which /at the same time/ will reflect a
/human-read function/ concept -- a function from math and programming. %
- what is this?
The good thing of JS, that it (in contrast with all those Python, Ruby,
Erlang, etc) has _the same_ syntactically definition of a /casual
subroutine/ -- a function declaration (FD) and a /"functional object"/
-- a literally defined function expression (FE). Python has `def`s and
`lambda`s, Ruby has `def`s, `lambda`s, `proc`s, blocks and other, Erlang
- casual functions and `fun`s.
JS is better: (1) all functions (FE, (N)FE) are defined syntactically
the same, (2) all are closures, (3) all are higher-order functions.
So it may be good to keep it the same, but then casual FDs should be
defined as:
fun foo() {
...
}
[1, 2, 3].map(fun(x) { x * x});
But I guess you want to keep "function" keyword to defined casual FD (or
"lambda" I've heard). If simple functions will be named as "lambda"s, it
can also be used in "funargs":
lambda foo() { -- not bad
...
}
[1, 2, 3].map(lambda(x) { x * x}); -- also nice
Perhaps the strawman page for shorter function syntax should list
reasons for rejecting other syntax options. I would be happy to
document the reasons against fn, fun, f and \, but I can't seem to
remember my username and password (I'm not even sure if I have an
account). Who can help with wiki access issues?
Yeah, that's interesting, I'll follow. I guess you'll describe also how
bad is "function" keyword _now_ (and not because it's long, I mean that
"problems" with parser, etc).
Regards,
Maciej
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_(C_language_extension)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_%28C_language_extension%29>
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