Hi Rick,
I entirely understand your concerns about the square brackets.
I don't know whether this is the time to spend our gold. I'm interested to
hear what others say.
I like the assignment to map-collections
A further thought. I have also seen other languages parsing an array into
variables thus:
[var1,var2,var3] = .array~of(value1, value2, value3)
but I think that is rather un-rexxish and certainly not just syntactic
sugar and imho is included in the other languages because of their poverty
of decent collections.
just my 2p worth
Jon
On 18 September 2014 14:24, Rick McGuire <[email protected]> wrote:
> I confess that I've been wanting a shortcut for creating arrays for a long
> time and have even considered submitting this feature request myself. This
> is not something difficult to implement, but my resistance to doing this
> has more to do with the fact that it introduces new syntax.
>
> Using square brackets for purposes other than message invocations has
> always been one of those "back pocket" syntax elements that have been held
> in reserve until a use that was good enough to say "yes, this is really
> what I want to use this for.". Other uses for brackets I've considered in
> the past have been multi-line literals and creating variable references.
> This has always been a balancing act. You don't want to use this on
> something trivial, but at the same time, you don't want to be so resistant
> to using it that you have effectively removed from being a possibility.
> Curly braces have been in this category for a VERY long time. We need to
> consider if "syntactic" sugar is important enough use for this syntactic
> concept.
>
> Admittedly, array objects are very important in ooRexx. They pop up in
> lots of situations as return values and also as arguments to both
> instructions and methods. Are they important enough that they get the
> special syntax rather than some other object type? That needs to be
> considered. There are a few obvious places where this might make a lot of
> sense. Jon shows the obvious assignment case, but this would be fairly
> useful for things like DO OVER
>
> do name over ["Mike", "Jon", "David"]
>
> looks nicer than
>
> do name over .array~of("Mike", "Jon", "David")
>
> and feels a bit more natural and integrate.
>
> Being able to create arrays without a lot of extra syntax would make
> something like OF methods for map collections workable. For example,
>
> locs = .directory~of(["Rick", "USA"], ["Mike", "UK"])
>
> where you are using the array syntax to create index/value pairs for
> insertion into the directory.
>
> Anyway, I've laid out the issues as I see them. I think this is something
> that needs a bit of discussion before a decision is made because of the
> syntax issues. The 5.0 release I've been working on would be a good place
> to introduce this concept.
>
> Rick
>
> Rick
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jon Wolfers <[email protected]>
> Date: Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 5:08 AM
> Subject: [oorexx:feature-requests] #613 Syntactic sugar for array creation
> To: Ticket 613 <[email protected]>
>
>
>
>
>
> ---
>
> ** [feature-requests:#613] Syntactic sugar for array creation**
>
> **Status:** unread
> **Milestone:** None
> **Created:** Thu Sep 18, 2014 09:08 AM UTC by Jon Wolfers
> **Last Updated:** Thu Sep 18, 2014 09:08 AM UTC
> **Owner:** nobody
>
> Just an idea.
>
> How about a bit of syntactic sugar such that
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~
> variable = ['First','Second','Third']
> ~~~~~~~~~~
> is equivalent to
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~
> variable = .array~of('First','Second','Third')
> ~~~~~~~~~~
>
> It could also be allowed for cases like
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~
> do variable over ['First','Second','Third']
> ...
> end
> ~~~~~~~~~~
>
>
>
> I have seen this in other languages and think it is quite neat
>
> Jon
>
>
> ---
>
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