4 ms·

> Similar things you'd do with a function without a name - work directly with the data at hand, without having to do the extra round trip to the attic to declar

> Similar things you'd do with a function without a name - work directly with the data at hand, without having to do the extra round trip to the attic to declare its name or shape. Note that in Alef, tuples are essentially a dual for an aggr, but with unnamed fields. So one always has to (explicitly, or implicitly via inference) declare its 'shape', in terms of number of members, and type of members. So one could declare: tuple (int, byte *, int) t; Then manipulate 't', one could also have a function return a tuple as in: tuple (int, byte *, int) something(int x) { /* ... */ } Then handle its return value either as: t = something(2); or byte *str; int value; (nil, str, value) = something(7); However the tuple 'shape' is always statically determined. Is that in your view satisfactory, or not? Or do you desires something where the tuple is an entirely dynamic type, sort of akin to syntax sugar on top of '[]interface{}'? More akin to the sort of dynamic thing which Python offers? Such that one can potentially have a program run, and each call to a given function returning a tuple may have different numbers of elements, potentially of different types within it. So that for said program, if the function return value depended upon input data, one could not determine the full set of tuples which may be returned?

rollcat 2y ago
Since func() (A, B) is different from func() (A, B, C), I'd expect first-class tuples to do the same. At which point there would be a lot of similarity between (A, B) and struct{A, B}. Perhaps they should be equivalent? From which "struct{a A, b B} = f()", or even "switch x.(type) { case struct{a A, b B}: ...}", or "case (a A, b B): ..." could follow. It might be too much Rust influence, but it might be a good influence, given there's already a lot of interest in unions/enums/ADTs (but see "start with goals"). The counter-arguments are that "type A struct{}" and "type B struct{}" are different types, and that anonymous structs are seldom found in the wild (likely due to their verbosity), but perhaps this is a chicken-and-egg problem? Go already does local type inference, because "var mypackage.VeryLongThing = mypackage.NewVeryLongThing()" is stupidly repetitive. But there's always a fine balance between code being terse and readable (I will never wrap my head around APL).

rollcat 2y ago

Since func() (A, B) is different from func() (A, B, C), I'd expect first-class tuples to do the same. At which point there would be a lot of similarity between (A, B) and struct{A, B}. Perhaps they should be equivalent? From which "struct{a A, b B} = f()", or even "switch x.(type) { case struct{a A, b B}: ...}", or "case (a A, b B): ..." could follow. It might be too much Rust influence, but it might be a good influence, given there's already a lot of interest in unions/enums/ADTs (but see "start with goals"). The counter-arguments are that "type A struct{}" and "type B struct{}" are different types, and that anonymous structs are seldom found in the wild (likely due to their verbosity), but perhaps this is a chicken-and-egg problem? Go already does local type inference, because "var mypackage.VeryLongThing = mypackage.NewVeryLongThing()" is stupidly repetitive. But there's always a fine balance between code being terse and readable (I will never wrap my head around APL).