On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 3:12 PM 'Axel Wagner' via golang-nuts
<golang-nuts@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> I dislike the idea of using $ and @ because I don't want to add new symbols
> to the language, if it can be avoided. In general I'd argue that Go tends to
> use keywords instead of symbols to convey meaning - e.g. we don't write `a ->
> b`, but `func(a) b`. There are exceptions (pointers are a big one) of course,
> but Go is still pretty light on symbols.
> I think the overuse of symbols to convey semantics is a huge reason that I
> find perl and Haskell so unreadable, personally.
There are 31 printable, non blank, non-digit, non-letter ASCII
symbols. Go (lexical grammar) currently uses 27 of them. I'm not sure
if using 27 of 31 vs using 29 out 31 makes a notable difference. (I
have not counted smybol groups like ":=" ">=", "<-" etc., but that
makes the number of symbols used in Go only bigger, not smaller.)
But of course, a keyword would work as well. For example, $ can be
replaced with no semantic change with 'type'. And @ can be dropped
while keeping the original draft syntax for type instantiation - and
the original parsing ambiguities. Then we can have something like
Original:
func Keys(type K comparable, V interface{})(m map[K]V) []K { ... }
s := Keys(int, string)(m)
Alternative-AW:
func Keys(m map[type K comparable]type V) []K
s := Keys(int, string)(m)
FTR: In the alternative draft I missed the `~` (tilde) character, so
there are not 3 but actually 4 ASCII symbols not used by Go.
But I like the $, @ option because the language change is pushed
"down" to be based mainly in the lexer grammar. I haven't made any
attempt to write a parser for the alternative draft, but I think this
makes the changes on top of the existing parser pretty minimal. The
original draft, on the other hand, needs IMO much more changes.
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