A nice way to step into 2012

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-12-28 18:15, deadalnix wrote:
> Le 28/12/2011 13:54, bearophile a écrit :
>> Timon Gehr:
>>
>>> => expr
>>>
>>> should imo be a shorthand for
>>>
>>> () => expr.
>>>
>>> It saves some ((())(()))().
>>
>> It saves few (), but zero argument lambdas aren't that common in my
>> functional-style code, and I think it decreases syntax uniformity and
>> code readability. So I think it's a bad idea.
>>
>> On the other hand I think extending the applicability of this syntax
>> to free functions/methods (as in Scala and Ada2012) is a nice idea, to
>> shorten tiny functions/methods, that are common enough:
>>
>> class C {
>> private int x;
>> int getX() => x;
>> }
>>
>
> That would be great ! Uniformity is something we should look for.
>
>> ------------------------
>>
>> Walter:
>>
>>> They expect to see it, or else they mark D as "not having lambdas"
>>> and "not supporting functional programming".<
>>
>> To me this sounds like a bit silly argument to base language design on.
>>
>> In my opinion the most important reason for the introduction of this
>> anonymous function syntax is that it makes D functional-style code
>> (and generally code that uses lot of callbacks) less noisy, so it
>> makes it more easy to write and read.
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>
> Both argument are fallacy. Javascript is a successful language (even if
> some design decisions are arguably very bad). It use a lot of callback,
> and promote event drivent programming so this type of consrtruct is used
> everywhere. In addition, in Javascript, code source size matters.
>
> The syntax to do such a thing is more verbose in javascript. So
> definitively, this is a nice syntax, but this isn't that ground
> breaking, and this isn't even required for people to use this type of
> constructs.

I use CoffeeScript (which compiles to JavaScript) and it has a lot nicer 
lambda syntax.

foo = (arg) ->
     arg()

foo ->
     # lambda code here

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg