3 ms·

I love the use of end for blocks! It avoids the arguments about brace placement on one hand and problems with space sensitive indention on the other. It is simp

by pavon 8y ago

I love the use of end for blocks! It avoids the arguments about brace placement on one hand and problems with space sensitive indention on the other. It is simple, consistent, easy to read and write. Yes, easy to write. Seriously, I can type short words like end just as quickly as I can type shift-}, two keys off in the extremes of the keyboard layout. I think it gets a bad reputation from languages like bash that have a horribly inconsistent mix of `fi`, `end`, `esac`, and require opening words like `then` and `do`, which people can argue about where to place. end worked great in pascal and matlab, and it works great in julia as well.

mruts 8y ago
I mean, what about auto-generated code? Not only does using words forbid potential variable names, but it makes code generation more difficult as well (as does tabs). A good positive example is Haskell, which uses tab for normal block delineation, but also allows curly brackets (which is usually only used for auto-generated code). By sharing block delineation with variable namespaces, the language creates a whole bunch of problems (a block identifier is essentially a newline followed by a “end” vs the much simpler “}”). Also, the more english centric a language becomes, the harder it is to learn for non-english language speakers. Moreover, words are used for variable names, while symbols are disallowed is many/most languages. By having block delineaters share the variable namespace, you detract from the readability of the language (as well as restricting variable names as I mentioned earlier). One might ask: Does any of this matter in the scheme of things? The fair and honest answer is: not really, it’s a minor syntactic difference. But I firmly believe using words to end blocks is still inferior, even if it’s not a big difference.
- 3JPLW 8y ago
  Autogenerated code is very easy in Julia — there is no string processing at all. You can splice things directly into quoted code (working at the literal syntax level) or manually modify the `Expr` representation in a lispy manner (in which case there aren't any `end`s at all). Code generation is _really_ easy, thanks to its lispy inspiration. Block delineation in Julia doesn't require the newline. You can just throw a ` end` at the end of the line. Often you'll see folks put the `;` line delimiter there, too, to make things super-clear (as that's generally how you delineate multiple expressions on the same line), but it's not required for an `end`. And while it is indeed a little sad that you can't use `end` as a variable name, we make the most of it by using it to also represent the last index in an indexing expression like `A[end]`. So, yeah, not a big deal at all, but very few of your detractions even apply in the first place. :)

by pavon 8y ago

mruts 8y ago

I mean, what about auto-generated code? Not only does using words forbid potential variable names, but it makes code generation more difficult as well (as does tabs). A good positive example is Haskell, which uses tab for normal block delineation, but also allows curly brackets (which is usually only used for auto-generated code). By sharing block delineation with variable namespaces, the language creates a whole bunch of problems (a block identifier is essentially a newline followed by a “end” vs the much simpler “}”). Also, the more english centric a language becomes, the harder it is to learn for non-english language speakers. Moreover, words are used for variable names, while symbols are disallowed is many/most languages. By having block delineaters share the variable namespace, you detract from the readability of the language (as well as restricting variable names as I mentioned earlier). One might ask: Does any of this matter in the scheme of things? The fair and honest answer is: not really, it’s a minor syntactic difference. But I firmly believe using words to end blocks is still inferior, even if it’s not a big difference.

3JPLW 8y ago
Autogenerated code is very easy in Julia — there is no string processing at all. You can splice things directly into quoted code (working at the literal syntax level) or manually modify the `Expr` representation in a lispy manner (in which case there aren't any `end`s at all). Code generation is _really_ easy, thanks to its lispy inspiration. Block delineation in Julia doesn't require the newline. You can just throw a ` end` at the end of the line. Often you'll see folks put the `;` line delimiter there, too, to make things super-clear (as that's generally how you delineate multiple expressions on the same line), but it's not required for an `end`. And while it is indeed a little sad that you can't use `end` as a variable name, we make the most of it by using it to also represent the last index in an indexing expression like `A[end]`. So, yeah, not a big deal at all, but very few of your detractions even apply in the first place. :)