> This proposal mentions OCaml, Haskell and JS as prior works of art for > this type of feature. I think a key thing to point out is that in those > languages, they did not need to add additional syntax in order to > support this.
This is true, and the discomfort extends to Ruby as well. For reasons explained in Austin's reply <https://groups.google.com/g/elixir-lang-core/c/P6VprVlRd6k/m/ijxO7HdpAgAJ>, a "barewords" implementation is not viable in Elixir, because of the prevalence of both atom and string key types. IMO, discussing the nuance of if a barewords representation should prefer atoms or keys is what has been continually holding this feature up for a decade, and that's what this proposal tries to move past. Perhaps in an ideal Elixir 2.0 future if we get garbage collection of atoms like Ruby, Phoenix can move over to parsing params with atom-based key pairs, we can drop the operator and atom/string differentiation, and move the entire syntax over to barewords. Worth calling out that this proposal (with a new operator, not the capture operator) could remain backwards-compatible with the proposed syntax if we moved into an atom-oriented Phoenix params parsing Elixir 2.0 future. As Elixir 2.0 may never get released, famously, this is the only clear path I see forward for our production applications today to get field punning, that skirts issues with prior art. On Wednesday, June 28, 2023 at 11:27:48 PM UTC-5 me wrote: > This proposal mentions OCaml, Haskell and JS as prior works of art for > this type of feature. I think a key thing to point out is that in those > languages, they did not need to add additional syntax in order to > support this. > > In OCaml, the syntax goes from > > { foo = foo; bar = bar } > > to > > { foo; bar } > > Haskell starts with > > C { foo = foo, bar = bar } > > and turns into > > C { foo, bar } > > And lastly, Javascript uses > > { foo: foo, bar: bar } > > which can be used as > > { foo, bar } > > Note the lack of additional syntax surrounding these features. > > > {foo, bar, baz} = {1, 2, 3} > > > > %{$:foo, "fizz" => "buzz", $"bar", fizz: :buzz} > > # => %{:fizz => :buzz, :foo => 1, "bar" => 2, "fizz" => "buzz"} > > If I were coming from one of the above languages (or any other language > that supports this feature), I would not look at this syntax and say > "This is field punning". I would have no intuition what is going on. > > Speaking as someone that has a decent amount of Elixir experience, > $"bar" looks like it should be closer in functionality to :"bar" than > field punning. Or maybe even similar to using ? to find the codepoint of > a single character. Something to keep in mind, Erlang actually uses $ > for the same purpose that Elixir uses ?. I'm not saying Elixir couldn't > use the same token/operator for a different purpose, I just think it is > something that should be considered. > > Justin > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elixir-lang-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/aee0f98a-9b9b-4ff0-9a48-08d4e31df8c5n%40googlegroups.com.
