FWIW, one of the things that made this take so long is that there are a
number of related dichotomies, which we kept trying to collapse together
(or use the wrong one):
- primitive type vs reference type
- primitive vs class
- inline class vs identity class
- pass/store by reference vs pass/store by value
- nullable vs non-nullable
- direct vs indirect
On 6/10/2020 11:20 AM, Dan Smith wrote:
On Jun 9, 2020, at 6:00 PM, Brian Goetz <[email protected]> wrote:
- The syntax ".val" used to denote an "inline type" is a bit of a mismatch. Maybe we want a new syntax. Or
maybe we want to rework the word "value" into the story so that "inline type" becomes "value type".
This was my reaction too. ".val" means "the value itself, that you care about", and ".ref" means
"a reference value that points to the value you care about", but I used the word "value" more times in the
second phrase. It doesn't feel like this will be clear.
My intention here was to appeal to terms many users already understand: pass by
value and pass by reference. That's why `V.val` is not `V.inline`.
Sure. And maybe that value/reference dichotomy can be extended into the terms we use in
the model. So, the "values" of the language (using the term formally) are
*values* (objects) and *references to values*. Now there's a nice alignment between the
syntax and the terminology.
Or given that "objects" parenthetical, maybe "object" is the right term: the
values of the language are *objects* and *references to objects*. In that case, maybe the syntax
should be 'Foo.obj'. The objects themselves, not references.
