4 ms·

it's crazy, it took "the industry" 30+ years to adopt this stuff

• fire_lake 2y ago
  And they still haven’t! Although expressions over statements would be a breaking change - I can’t see any mainstream language making this switch.
  • tialaramex 2y ago
    Barry Revzin has written a paper to try to give C++ expressions like this. It's ugly, even by the standards of C++ but it would work. The rationale is that C++ 29 or C++ 32 wil probably get pattern matching and pattern matching doesn't have great ergonomics if everything is a statement rather than an expression. There are plenty of other things C++ will need to fix once it gets pattern matching, but the direction makes sense if you insist on trying to teach this particular old dog new tricks. Also, I think Rust would consider itself to be a mainstream language, though they aren't techically "making this switch" because the language has always been expresion oriented from the outset. The Book has about two paragraphs about the statements in the language and then a whole chapter on expressions because almost everything is an expression.
  • tmountain 2y ago
    Still waiting on real pattern matching in TyoeScript.
    • no_wizard 2y ago
      You won’t get it till TC39 adopts it
  • BalinKing 2y ago
    I actually think it's becoming fairly common these days—IIRC Ruby and Rust both prioritize expressions over statements.
    • int_19h 2y ago
      They do, but the fact that there is even a distinction at this point is rather baffling. If your type system has the unit type and the bottom type, all statements should just be expressions having one of those two types.
      • fire_lake 2y ago
        People really like their early return statements however.
      • needlesslygrim 2y ago
        Well, Rust barely has statements [1]. Nearly everything in Rust is an expression, and AFAIK statements /are/ essentially expressions that yield `()` [2]. [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/statements.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/statements.html [2]: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2024&gist=12aacef98d63cb28ec12b0ae96308619 https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
        • steveklabnik 2y ago
          > AFAIK statements /are/ essentially expressions that yield `()` This isn't true. The inverse is true, "expression statements" can turn an expression into a statement. What you're seeing in the playground is just how blocks are defined[1]: > The syntax for a block is {, then any inner attributes, then any number of statements, then an optional expression, called the final operand, and finally a }. In this case, you have one statement, and no optional expression. And so: > The type of a block is the type of the final operand, or () if the final operand is omitted. So that's how this works. Now, that being said, I don't think it's too terrible of a mental model to think of this situation in that way. But if we're getting into nitty-gritty details, that's not actually how it works. 1. https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/reference/expressions/block-expr.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/reference/expressions/block...
          • int_19h 2y ago
• Almondsetat 2y ago
  do you have any research that points to these things being useful for the industry?
  • sudahtigabulan 2y ago
    The languages that were actually adopted by the industry are not exactly full of great useful stuff: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat