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1 point by Jesin 6086 days ago | link | parent

And where does most ssyntax go? At the end of identifiers.

Also, consider that

  (foo? 'baz)
can be written as

  foo?!baz
Mixing punctuation like this gets weird.


3 points by absz 6086 days ago | link

Actually, we right now have no ssyntax that goes at the end of identifiers. Arc has ten pieces of syntax. () and [] are circumfix. ' ` , ,@ and ~ are prefix. : . and ! are infix. The two syntax requests I recall off the top of my head were (1) being able to write $(...) for some reason, which is prefix; and (2) being able to write ($f ...) for (map f ...), which is also prefix. So from a preliminary study (admittedly, with very few data points, but that's all there are), it appears that prefix syntax is the most common.

And as for the foo?!baz observation? Don't do that then :) Seriously, I don't think that's a problem. Just because we can write something like ~+:/.3.1@-2.5!-1 doesn't mean we should. (If you're curious, that is currently legal and expands to (compose (complement +) (/ 3 1@-2 5 '-1)) [r@q is notation for the complex number with magnitude r and angle q, just in case you haven't seen it before.]).

EDIT: Used to say "that's actually probably a bug, since I was expecting it to expand to (compose (complement +) (/ 3.1@-2.5 '-1)), but how often will we be putting complex numbers inside ssyntax?," but that was wrong (see http://arclanguage.org/item?id=5090).

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2 points by eds 6086 days ago | link

That expansion isn't a bug. You just can't put floating point numbers into ssyntax.

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=2180

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1 point by absz 6086 days ago | link

D'oh. How'd I miss that? Thanks.

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