On Monday, June 17, 2013 2:34:00 PM UTC-5, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
>
> I do not like the idea of accessing functions with arbitrary names.
>
> I would rather also disallow:
>
> let dict['/foo'] = function('tr')
>
> Would that break any plugin?
>
Hi, Bram! I saw in your recent todo.txt update that you still have a note about
possibly removing this functionality.
Consider the following use case based on a real need I had once:
A communication protocol has 2-byte IDs for commands. Each command identified
by this 2-byte ID has potentially different command lengths and meaning of the
remaining bytes in the message.
I want to parse a capture file containing a hex representation of this
communication protocol. In real life, I would probably do this using Perl so
others on my team can use it, but I *could* do it in Vim.
So, I create a Dict in vim with key strings corresponding to the hex value of
the command IDs, e.g. "12AE". I assign each key a function reference to be used
to parse the rest of that particular message.
Note that "12AE" is an invalid function name. But I want to be able to call a
function corresponding to that name in a lookup table anyway.
Now, "12AE" isn't too weird of a name. But the protocol could be based on ASCII
characters instead of byte values. Perhaps commands look like /command and data
looks like [data]. Perhaps I want to be able to look up "/command" in the
lookup table.
I think allowing arbitrary dict keys to point to function references is a very
useful feature. And it isn't confusing if you remember that you're storing a
function reference in a Dict, not naming a function with a weird name. I think
we should definitely keep the ability to assign a function reference to an
arbitrary dict key. Furthermore, using this syntax:
function dict['/foo']()
endfunction
allows doing this in a way that will not pollute the function namespace with
extra functions that never get called directly.
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