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5 points by pg 6110 days ago | link | parent

It doesn't seem a good idea to use characters that have special syntactic meaning in the names of things. You can't name a function foo(bar either, but that doesn't seem odd because Lisp hackers are used to ( being different from other characters.


4 points by cadaver 6110 days ago | link

It seems too that special end-of-symbol handling in the core, just because some users might possibly want to use intrasymbol-notation characters at the end of function names, does not go well with Arc's design philosophy:

... avoid having a language designed according to arbitrary rules rather than the actual demands of the task ...

http://www.arclanguage.com/item?id=2555

Good philosophy I think.

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1 point by tel 6109 days ago | link

This is potentially an issue if you open up intrasymbol syntax though. It'd be pathologically dumb, but what happens if I set up - to be an intrasymbol macro?

Solution: perhaps user defined intrasymbol macros should be surrounded by colons (:-:) by convention? Do intrasymbol macros support multiple characters?

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