4 ms·

The thing which surprised me was not the variable shadowing, rather that the name "item" resovles to different variables on the left and right sides of the :=.

The thing which surprised me was not the variable shadowing, rather that the name "item" resovles to different variables on the left and right sides of the :=. This is unusual language design, most languages assign a single meaning to each name in each scope.

int_19h 4y ago
It's unusual for the C-style family, but very common in functional languages outside of it, such as the ML family. It's not uncommon to see repeated lines of the form: let x = ... x ... and every such line is a declaration of a new variable that shadows the preceding one.
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  Not in Haskell at least. What ML language are you thinking of?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    I had OCaml in mind, but this is perfectly legal Haskell, too: let x = 0 in let x = x + 1 in ...
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      fwiw i've also seen this in Rust quite often: let foo = foo.clone(); let bar = bar.into_inner(); let baz = baz.to_owned(); let quz = quz.unwrap(); ...