On Nov 27, 6:55 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:21:01 -0800, Travis Parks wrote:
> > Personally, I find a lot of good things in Python. I thinking tabs are
> > out-of-date. Even the MAKE community wishes that the need for tabs would
> > go away and many implementations have done just that.
>
> Tabs have every theoretical advantage and only one practical
> disadvantage: the common toolsets used by Unix programmers are crap in
> their handling of tabs, and instead of fixing the toolsets, they blame
> the tabs.
>
> The use of spaces as indentation is a clear case of a technically worse
> solution winning over a better solution.
>
> > I have been
> > seriously debating about whether to force a specific number of spaces,
> > such as the classic 4, but I am not sure yet. Some times, 2 or even 8
> > spaces is appropriate (although I'm not sure when).
>
> Why on earth should your language dictate the width of an indentation? I
> can understand that you might care that indents are consistent within a
> single source code unit (a file?), but anything more than that is just
> obnoxious.
>
> > I have always found the standard library for Python to be disjoint. That
> > can be really beneficial where it keeps the learning curve down and the
> > size of the standard modules down. At the same time, it means
> > re-learning whenever you use a new module.
>
> I know what disjoint means, but I don't understand what you think it
> means for a software library to be disjoint. I don't understand the rest
> of the paragraph.
>
> > My language combines generators and collection initializers, instead of
> > creating a whole new syntax for comprehensions.
>
> > [| for i in 0..10: for j in 0.10: yield return i * j |]
>
> Are we supposed to intuit what that means?
>
> Is | a token, or are the delimiters [| and |] ?
>
> Is there a difference between iterating over 0..10 and iterating over
> what looks like a float 0.10?
>
> What is "yield return"?
>
> > Lambdas and functions are the same thing in my language, so no need for
> > a special keyword.
>
> That does not follow. Lambdas and def functions are the same thing in
> Python, but Python requires a special keyword.
>
> > I also distinguish between initialization and
> > assignment via the let keyword.
>
> What does this mean? I can guess, but I might guess wrong.
>
> > Also, non-locals do not need to be
> > defined explicitly, since the scoping rules in Unit are far more "anal".
>
> What does this mean? I can't even guess what you consider more anal
> scoping rules.
>
> > In reality though, it takes a certain level of arrogance to assume that
> > any language will turn out without bumps. It is like I was told in
> > college long ago, "Only the smallest programs are bug free." I think the
> > same thing could be said for a language. The only language without flaws
> > would be so small that it would be useless.
>
> I'm pretty sure that being so small that it is useless would count as a
> flaw.
>
> What does it mean to say that a language is "small"?
>
> A Turing Machine is a pretty small language, with only a few
> instructions: step forward, step backwards, erase a cell, write a cell,
> branch on the state of the cell. And yet anything that can be computed,
> anything at all, can be computed by a Turning Machine: a Turing Machine
> can do anything you can do in C, Lisp, Fortran, Python, Java... and very
> probably anything you can (mentally) do, full stop. So what does that
> mean about "small" languages?
>
> On the other hand, take Epigram, a functional programming language:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigram_(programming_language)
>
> It is *less* powerful than a Turing Machine, despite being far more
> complex. Similarly languages like regular expressions, finite automata
> and context-free grammers are more complex, "bigger", possibly with
> dozens or hundreds of instructions, and yet less powerful. Likewise for
> spreadsheets without cycles.
>
> Forth is much smaller than Java, but I would say that Forth is much, much
> more powerful in some sense than Java. You could write a Java compiler in
> Forth more easily than you could write a Forth compiler in Java.
>
> --
> Steven
>
>
Yes. I was mostly rambling. More explanation would have meant more
typing.
Languages that use type inference heavily typically find unique ways
of indicating literals, including numbers and collections. In Unit,
[||] indicates fixed length arrays, [] is for dynamic arrays, {} is
for sets and unordered dictionaries (at least one value is needed). A
frozen set might be represented with a {||} in the future. I stole the
syntax from F#. Numbers have a trailing letter indicating their types:
signed byte (y), short (s), long (l), float (f), fixed (m), arbitrary
precision (i), rational (r) and imaginary (j). Unsigned versions have
a u before the letter (uy).
Also, .. is the range operator in Unit. 0..10 means "0 through 10" and
0.1 means a floating point number (I missed a dot). 0..10..2 means 0,
2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Saves me from needing a range function, like Python.
Quite a few functional languages support that syntax.
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