On 06.04.2018 21:21, MG wrote:
My suggestion was not to consider allowing any whitespace to break
syntax ambiguity here, but only a newline after the opening square
bracket, i.e.:
whitespace in terms of the groovy grammar includes newline usually.
// Still does not compile
final result = foo [ "some rather long literal string argument",
"another long literal string argument",
"and so on and so forth...",
]
// Parsed as foo([ ... ]) (not foo-index-access)
final result = foo [
"some rather long literal string argument",
"another long literal string argument",
"and so on and so forth...",
]
so you want
list[0]
keep as is now and
list[
0
]
be instead list([0])?
If the parser can do it, it would feel Groovy to me to allow it for this
use case (Of course it could still mean "index access", but how many
people would really write an index access on foo that way ?).
asking "but how many people would" is always to be answered with
"potentially many"
Groovy 3.0 is the place to ponder such questions, imho, because breaking
changes will come anyway afaiks (Java 9 modules), so you do it here, or
not for a long time...
Would be interested what others think, or if someone has a counter
example that makes it clear it is a bad idea to go down that route,
why not use
final result = foo (
"some rather long literal string argument",
"another long literal string argument",
"and so on and so forth..."
)
instead and make foo use Object...? The real problem is a different one
imho.
people try things and start debugging code with println. They have for
example
return [x,y]
and change this now to
println [x,y]
return [x,y]
or log it...
Obviously they started with a list and do not want indexing at all. They
want the method call variant you propose. But in my experience this has
really been the only case where it plays a role. And I think to give it
up just because of that... give up I mean because I prefer having to
write println([x,y]) to simulate the method call, than having to
write... println.getAt([x,y]) to simulate the index. Especially since
the later requires people to actually now the method name used for the
index operation, which in most cases, they will not care about really.
And do you really want to write
println [
x,y]
to get a method call?
bye Jochen
