4 ms·
> I don't find this appealing on its face. Extreme terseness, even when done very elegantly, makes programs very hard to read and sometimes also hard to maintai
by Yoric 3y ago
> I don't find this appealing on its face. Extreme terseness, even when done very elegantly, makes programs very hard to read and sometimes also hard to maintain.
In that case, it's more about minimizing the language, rather than the programs. call/cc is a single instruction that is sufficiently expressive to implement e.g. exceptions, coroutines and lots of stuff for which people typically use monad-style embeddings.
Making the language easier to specify is generally a good thing, because it makes all forms of static analysis and compilation easier (at least theoretically) and because there are fewer places to hide bugs in the compiler/interpreter. Of course, you move the potential bugs to the libraries, but that's generally considered better, because it's easier to debug.
> I suspect that's one of the reasons Lisps (and functional languages in general) haven't caught up in popularity even as it becomes much easier to adopt one for any target and in any organization.
Well, to be fair, functional constructs have made it to pretty much all mainstream languages these days.
- andyferris 3y agoI believe the point was you can say the same about goto. With goto you can replace if/else, for loops, while loops, functions, exceptions, etc, making for a very minimal language. Yet structured programming is superior. (I probably don’t know enough about call/cc to know if that’s a totally fair comparison, but languages being more restrictive/less flexible can be good overall in terms of aiding understanding/reducing bugs/etc)
- duped 3y agoI think people are misunderstanding that you can have a small core language and use that for static analysis (a smaller language means fewer typing rules which means a simpler type checker). You can always define higher level sugar in terms of the small core language to make it easier for programmers which has the advantage of making a more ergonomic language without changing fundamentals like the type system or linkage.
- Dylan16807 3y agoVery powerful rules aren't good for static analysis either.
- ekidd 3y ago> call/cc is a single instruction that is sufficiently expressive to implement e.g. exceptions, coroutines and lots of stuff for which people typically use monad-style embeddings. The flip side of this is that call/cc prevents you from relying on a stack, except in cases where you can do heavy static analysis. And you virtually never need the full power of call/cc unless you're implementing coroutines. This is the main reason that so few languages support call/cc: stacks are a nice implementation technique (as opposed to GCed activation records on the heap), and call/cc comes with a heavy price for very situational value. One alternative are "escape" continuations, which can only be used during the lifetime of the creating block. These are stack friendly.