On Thursday, 16 July 2020 at 12:51:03 UTC-7 Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 12:41 PM joshua harr <joshu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Just a note on your rationale for why not to use <: :> : > > "... requires more typing." Golang has, rather famously, never shied > away from making developers type more. The reason it hasn't, as far as I > understand, is that code is read far often than it is written, and so the > extra verbosity is worth the ease in reading the code. IMHO, that principle > very much applies here. The *readability* of the syntax should be a far > more important consideration than whether there is an extra character in > the syntax. > > That's a fair point. Having two characters is still in my mind a > disadvantage, but I agree that that disadvantage could be outweighed > by a gain in readability. > > That said, personally I don't find <:T:> to be any more (or less) > readable than [T]. > > Ian >
I agree that readability should be a big consideration. The problem with [T] is that you need to actively read the surrounding code to discern between a possible array access or type parameter. I would prefer it to be immediately obvious so that visually scanning through code is as fast and clear as can be. An alternative syntax to [T] that could enable "quick looks" is [[T]]. It would be nice to use <<T>>, but that has parsing ambiguities with the existing bit-shift operator, just as <T> is ambiguous with the comparison operator. The burden of typing the same character twice on a keyboard in quick succession for [[T]] is more or less the same as the single-character version [T] and less so than two-character delimiters like <: and :>, and especially those delimiters that require the shift-key in play at the same time. jpap -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/74bd82c9-c612-43c5-a263-0adcf739372cn%40googlegroups.com.
