> Hi Joe, interested to know what the advantage is,
> since the current code looks prettier, cleaner and more obvious than
> your syntax.
>
> especially the seperation of quotations, and the different character
> (curly brace) to encompass them all with 3&&
>
> you add two characters to figure out, and break the encapsulation of
> the quotation.
> maybe I miss-understand your purpose here
It's a matter of taste, perhaps, but to me, adding two layers of depth
({ [ ] }) for basic things like a short-circuit sequence or repeated
use of a value always felt a bit too much. The quotations in a cleave,
spread, &&, or other sequence macro are interrelated enough that I
feel a lighter-weight syntax is justified. The wins of my proposed
syntax aren't very obvious with the medium-sized example I gave, but
if you look at some very small or very large examples, I think it
becomes more clear. On the small side, a simple cleave with several
short quotations looks pretty heavy with all those brackets:
20 { [ 1+ ] [ 1- ] [ 2^ ] } cleave
Now we have bi and tri, which make that outer array layer unnecessary
for 2- or 3-branch cleaves, but they add maintenance overhead when you
add or remove a branch; you either need to change the "bi" or "tri"
word to match the new number of branches, or wrap the whole works in
"cleave" when you hit more than three. To me, the shorthand syntax
makes always using the general "cleave" more tolerable and the bi/tri
words less necessary:
20 [[ 1+ ;; 1- ;; 2^ ]] cleave
! vs.
20 [ 1+ ] [ 1- ] [ 2^ ] tri
"tri" is still a shorter word than "cleave", but other than that,
those two lines are even in number of keystrokes spent. The "cleave"
line is more flexible; you can easily add a fourth branch or remove a
branch without altering the surrounding structure of the code.
(As an aside, I agree that ";;" doesn't have as much visual weight as
it should to separate quotations. I considered using "|" or "||", but
the former is already used in locals and the latter has too strong a
history as "logical OR". Maybe "][" would be better?)
On the other end, if you have an epic cleave with branches spanning
multiple lines, the standard syntax and indentation conventions
require two levels of indentation and a blank line between each
quotation:
gadget {
[
GL_PROJECTION glMatrixMode
glLoadIdentity
set-projection-matrix
] [
GL_MODELVIEW glMatrixMode
glLoadIdentity
set-modelview-matrix
] [
...
] [
...
]
} cleave
(Not necessarily code you'd actually write, but just an illustrative
example.) The shorthand syntax sheds a bunch of weight, I think:
gadget
[[ GL_PROJECTION glMatrixMode
glLoadIdentity
set-projection-matrix
;; GL_MODELVIEW glMatrixMode
glLoadIdentity
set-modelview-matrix
;; ...
;; ...
]] cleave
Again, it may just be a matter of taste.
-Joe
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