Re: [pure-lang-users] Proposed syntax changes

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Libor Spacek wrote:
> Maybe it is just me but when using Pure, I am always worrying: 'is this a tuple or is it a list?'

Ok, I see. But I think that like so many things it's just a matter of 
practice, getting to know the language. I agree that having an extra 
tuple type makes things more complex, but, as I tried to point out in a 
previous post, it also makes some stuff more readable or familiar.

If you come from a language like Haskell or Erlang where you're working 
with tuples all them time, then you'd surely miss them if they weren't 
provided. Real Lisp men of course don't need all that sugar. ;-) But 
language design is always a compromise, and every PL is a new exercise 
to find a certain sweet spot between simplicity, power and convenience. 
If you leave away everything that's not strictly needed, then you'll end 
up with combinatorial calculus without any builtins, but who would want 
to program in such a language?

Of course, Pure's tuples being flat is a ... hmm ... speciality that 
takes some time getting used to. But I wanted to have tuples in Pure for 
notational convenience, and this was a really cheap way to get them at 
the cost of just a single infix operator, requiring no builtins at all. 
So yes, they're an ideosyncrasy, but I dare say that they're also 
elegant in a way, IMNSHO.

> To complicate things further, I can also in many situations use simply 1 2 3, e.g.
>> let a = 1 2 3;

You don't want to do that. If your first element happens to be a hungry 
closure then you're busted. :)

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag