On 5 March 2016 at 19:29, Juergen Sauermann <juergen.sauerm...@t-online.de>
wrote:
IMHO a language does not get any better if it provides
> different syntactic constructs for (almost) the same thing. The complexity
> of the
> language is being increased without a noticeable benefit. I would also
> claim
> that the best languages are not those that have the most features, bit
> those
> that have a clean (and, minimal) structure.
>
While I agree with the general sentiment that generic, minimal structures
are better than lots of special cases, one should not always follow that
principle without exception.
After all, what is × if not just syntactic sugar for {+/⍺⍴⍵} ?
In my opinion, a better rule of thumb is to look at a proposed feature and
determine if it eliminates *unnecessary repetition*. Your example:
∇multi a
(a1 a2 a3)←a
Does not have much of repetition, and if this was the complete story I'd be
100% in agreement with you. However, you missed one thing:
∇multi a;a1;a2;a3
(a1 a2 a3)←a
Here we can see that there is repetition of the three variables a1, a2 and
a3. Whether that repetition is unnecessary or not I will leave to others to
judge, but the argument for this extension is certainly a valid one.
That said, I feel that there are plenty of potential extensions that should
be implemented that are much more important than this one, so I don't
personally care much about this one at all. :-)
Regards,
Elias
