On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 2:13 PM, David <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 10, 3:50 pm, Rich Hickey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > With this in mind it surprises me ( and disappoints a little ) that >> > there are still abbreviated function names in many places - aget, >> > aset, assoc, conj, coll?, comp, and so on. Is there any need for >> > this in the 21st century? >> >> I think so, but I understand this is somewhat subjective. It is useful >> to look at the 'competition' here (from random other languages): >> >> array-get -> [] >> associate -> put >> conjoin -> add >> compose -> . >> >> I don't see people coming from a language where array access is [] >> feeling good about the verbosity of array-get. > > You're right. We don't. Not only that. I can't think how aget instead > of [] (and all the similar verbosity, as it were) fits into "Almost no > syntax" and "Core advantage still code-as-data and syntactic > abstraction" of the "Lisp is a good thing" section of the (current) > Clojure rationale.
As I understand it, "Almost no syntax" means there is common syntax for everything instead of a bunch of special case syntax for various different situations. > While "Almost no syntax" may be a good thing for the development of > Clojure itself, from my point of view a[5] is less "syntax" than (aget > a 5). I'm not saying my opinion won't change. Through everyday usage > it probably will, but it'll take longer than it would have if the > "syntax" had been a little bit friendlier. Which brings me to another > issue: I bet that for newcomers, non-abbreviated names would make a > transition to Clojure a lot smoother. > > Now, such thinking caused quite a reaction from established > "believers" as I can see. Which leaves us with only one option: make > both notations possible / available. This is by no means a new > invention (see "man less" -> OPTIONS for example). Which, yet again, > brings me to another issue: switching between the two "perspectives" > in a decent IDE should be a click of a button (or a key-press) away: > an extended pretty-printer/formatter if you will. Your hypothetical IDE, could provide what you want whether or not longer aliases exist. There's nothing stopping someone from writing an IDE that converts aget to array-get or [] when it reads in a file and does the opposite when it writes it. -- Michael Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
