Re: [q-lang-users] [qlist] SDL anyone?

[Andrew B. <and...@ya...>]

On 27 Dec 2006, at 17:02, Albert Graef wrote:

> Andrew Berg wrote:
>> It's really a shame about the ":" character not being
>> allowed in identifiers...  I'll have to campaign for that at some  
>> point.  :)
>
> Unfortunately that's not possible; ':' is already used for type
> matching, and '::' for qualified identifiers. But there are two
> delimiters in the ASCII range, '%' and '?', which aren't currently  
> used
> and thus can be declared as operators.
>

The crazy part is that I don't even want it as an operator.  The  
syntax I'm looking for is their funny named parameters.  Example (in  
Obj-C (meaningless, but I'm just trying to show syntax)):

r = [SomeDictThing new];
for (i = 0; i < 10; i ++) {
   [r at: i put: j];
}

The part I want to co-opt is the 'r at: i put: j' where r would be my  
class instance, and 'at:' and 'put:' are q constructors which I would  
just use as place holders, and the 'i' and 'j' would be some kind of  
variables (or parenthesized expressions).  I could do it with the ':'  
dropped, but the readability suffers.  I could use some Unicode ':'  
replacement, but the type-ability suffers.  I could use a character  
that is allowed in identifiers, like '_', but that's just silly.

I do understand that things are as they are for some good reasons.   
My point was just that if the grammar could be mangled a bit to  
support it, I will probably make a sub-dialect to support my own evil  
designs.  And I would probably whine and cajole to get it added into  
the trunk.  :^)  But, don't worry yet.  It is low priority.  Before  
that, I have a SDL wrapper to make work.

-andrew