No, this is an excellent idea. Joe Armstrong is probably the most notable modern figure to have written and talked about making code content-addressable, with chunks of code (I forget the granularity he proposed, probably top-levels?) having names as metadata. IIRC, first at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4, then here: https://joearms.github.io/published/2015-03-12-The_web_of_names.html
There have been a variety of very niche programming tools that implement some variant of this (a single authoritative identifier for a patch of code or verse or other data structure, with display names being assigned and manipulated separately), but this brings us to the key passage in your message IMO: > The problem is I'm not sure how to do this with a text based programming language And here's the rub: no scheme like this will work or scale in the 80xN grid to which we've confined ourselves. That's IMO of course; I'll save you from opining further, I guess. :-) Projectional / structural editors are absolutely a thing though, so you'll find a lot if you search along those terms. A dedicated (but quiet) subreddit actually popped up on the topic not too long ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax/ Have fun, - Chas On Thursday, December 7, 2017 at 12:37:10 AM UTC-5, Didier wrote: > > Warning: This is the spawn of an idea, not very well refined, and that is > little extravagant. > > I've been doing some hammock time, and I've been thinking that names in a > programming language are kind of a complecting of two things, the human > readable form, and the machine identifier. What if a function always had > the same name, which never changed, from the moment the function was > created. This would be fine, until a human finds it didn't like the name > anymore, and thus a refactor of the name would occur, requiring to change > all references to the function. This is also true say of a spec, if you > want to change the name of the spec, its a big refactor to update all usage > of it. So var names and spec names are troubling in that if humans want to > refer to it differently, they also break all machine reference to them. > > So I thought, how awesome would it be if each named things in a > programming language would be given a unique machine name, which can be > used everywhere, and the name you saw was just meta-data for the programmer > to have a more human readable/descriptive name. > > The problem is I'm not sure how to do this with a text based programming > language. I can imagine a language where constructs would be first class, > not based on text, and thus all construct could be assigned a unique id and > a name, and the IDEs could easily hide the unique ids and project a view of > the construct with the human name instead. Code would be stored in a > structured format, and obviously a standard editor would not work, and an > IDE of some form would be required. > > So right now, my idea is that maybe you can compromise. If you added > support for Vars and specs, so that they can have like a doc-name. It would > be like a doc-string a bit, but it expects a name instead. That name could > be the human readable name, you could change it freely. The normal var name > or spec name would continue to be used as normal to refer to this var/spec > from other code. At its most basic it means you can have the normal name be > anything, maybe a name you don't like that much, or you could go further > and make it a guid if you want. Then you could make the doc-name the name > you want to use when talking to other people, or when people read the code. > Now IDEs could support this doc-name, so they could show the doc-name in > place everywhere you have code referring to the normal name. They could > auto-complete from doc-name to normal name, etc. > > So an IDE could still kind of hide this for you, and make it appear like > everything is just doc-name pointing to each other, and refactoring would > not require changing all code that refers to it, but actually its just a > change of the doc-name on the var or spec being pointed to, but the IDE > could quickly replace the new doc-name in place of the normal name > everywhere else. > > Where it would be maybe a bit more confusing, is when using an editor that > would not support doc-names to that extent. In those cases, you can ignore > doc-name, consider it just like one more piece of documentation. > > Doc-name could be optional too, so if you plan on working by yourself, or > just in a simple editor, you can ignore this whole thing and work as normal. > > Now maybe this whole thing is solved by having a powerful renaming > refactoring tool that can hunt for all usage and update the name everywhere > in a sound way, but that's harder to do in Clojure, and still breaks when > its a library for example, as you can't just refactor all consumers without > having both access to their code base, and even if you do, its tedious to > pull down everything in your desktop and set it up for such a refactor. > > I'd be interested in thoughts about this, even if its just, that sounds > like a terrible idea :p. > > Thanks. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. 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