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Humble submission to the cause - using "the" and "it" in a scripting language to avoid having to come up with variable names all the time. Way back, I'd design
by sriku 9y ago
Humble submission to the cause - using "the" and "it" in a scripting language to avoid having to come up with variable names all the time.
Way back, I'd designed a scheme-based scripting language called "muSE" [1] in which we created specifications for video editing styles. I also toyed with the language. One such experiment was having a way to refer to values already computed using "the" and "it". [2]
[1] https://github.com/srikumarks/muSE https://github.com/srikumarks/muSE
[2] https://github.com/srikumarks/muSE/wiki/TheAndIt https://github.com/srikumarks/muSE/wiki/TheAndIt
edit: This project isn't maintained, but the latest version 711 still works on macosx [3]
[3] https://code.google.com/archive/p/muvee-symbolic-expressions/downloads https://code.google.com/archive/p/muvee-symbolic-expressions...
- slaymaker1907 9y agoThere are already constructs like this. In all programming languages, you see variable names like data or result all over the place. Additionally, when using the python interpreter, there is a special variable _ for the last expression evaluated.
- euyyn 9y agoEither Kotlin or eXtend already have "it" for the default variable name of single-parameter lambdas.
- sriku 9y ago"it" is common in that sense, but muse additionally models "the" as a function that turns verbs into nouns - like we do. For example, (open-file "blah" 'for-writing) (write (the open-file) "hello world") (close it) Or (length (list "milk" "pudding")) (print "number of items is " (the length))
- gpawl 9y agoPerl has this, in $_, the default/implicit argument.