I agree with Juergen.
On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 10:33 AM, Juergen Sauermann < juergen.sauerm...@t-online.de> wrote: > Hi Xtian, > > thank you very much for your proposal. I am not too fond of the idea > though. > Not because of the coding effort on my side, but because of other > considerations. > > Consider the following syntactical variants of the same thing, and my > personal > judgements of their readability and portability: > > * Syntax Readability > Portability* > *a. Z←A ⎕FIO[3] B worse* > * no **b. Z←A ⎕FIO['fopen'] B OK no* > *c. Z←A FIO∆fopen B better yes* > > then your proposal (which is obviously *b.* above) is IMHO better > readable than a., > but arguably worse than c. (which is *)COPY 5 FILE_IO*). But there are > also some > downsides: > > - is is an entirely redundant syntax, and > - it lacks portability > > I believe it is generally a good thing to have a wrapper workspace like > *FILE_IO > *because it > makes workspaces using it portable to other interpreters (where, of > course, somebody > has to implement the functions provided by *FILE_IO*). It was, for > example, possible to change > the underlying implementation of *FILE_IO* from a native function to a > system function *⎕FIO*. > People using *FILE_IO* at that time would (at least conceptually) not > notice any difference > when that change was made, while people not using *FILE_IO* will need to > change their > workspaces all over the place when the native variant will finally > disappear. > > And my experiences with redundant syntax constructs in GNU APL are also > rather negative. > Looking backwards I would judge my decision to accept lambdas in GNU APL > (which was, BTW, > also proposed by a GNU APL user at that time) as my worst decision in the > GNU APL project so far. > > Best Regards, > /// Jürgen Sauermann > > > On 01/04/2017 07:16 AM, Christian Robert wrote: > > I would love to be able to do: > > fd ←⎕fio['open'] '.bashrc' > ⎕fio['fclose'] fd > > and so on ... > > I have a Workspace named "fio" who just do that, but I would love if > gnu-apl could just understand 'open'/'close'/... rather than just random > numbers, as actually. > > Numbers are fine, but a tagged name as in ⎕fio['bind'] would be a *plus*. > (no need for us to remember the random numbers, only the function name) > > Yes, a couple of hours for Juergen to code it, but so much > reliefs/and/easier on our side, as end user. > > my wishes for 2017 ;-) > > Xtian. > > >
