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1 point by tokipin 6153 days ago | link | parent

that makes sense. '!' is already being used (though the convention doesn't interfere with the syntax at the moment)

bear with me here, but '!' means the function isn't pure, right? if so, who cares? it seems like an ivory tower thing. ? is fine, though maybe prefix notation can be considered

  isPair
  isNumber
  dangerSet
  dangerSet-car


5 points by absz 6153 days ago | link

Just because something is academic doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. For instance, map, keep, reduce, etc. are different if passed a function with side-effects. What happens if you give them a function which modifies the list as it's being traversed? A pathological example:

  arc> (= x (range 1 5))
  (1 2 3 4 5)
  arc> (map [do (= (cdr x) (cddr x)) _] x)
  (1 3 4 5)
  arc> x
  (1)
However, if map is passed a pure function, you can e.g. run one copy of the function on each core and run it in parallel.

And "dangerSet" is both non-Lispy and non-Arcy. It's non-Arcy because it's long. And it's non-Lispy because of that capital letter: danger-set would be marginally better. But nevertheless, pair? is shorter than is-pair, and (in my opinion) reads much more nicely.

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