5 ms·

I always associated INTERCAL with COME FROM but it turns out that was "invented" separately (although its first implementation was in C-INTERCAL.)

• MangoToupe 1y ago
  I thought come-from was an early scheme primitive. It's pretty trivial to implement and it's a fun trick. Edit: i am very wrong. i also had no clue it was meant as a joke. I just figured someone had a use case.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• vnorilo 1y ago
  The recent C# feature called interceptors [1] pretty much looks like comefrom from where I stand. Yet everyone talking about it has either been serious, or very good at trolling. 1: https://khalidabuhakmeh.com/dotnet-8-interceptors https://khalidabuhakmeh.com/dotnet-8-interceptors
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    I am completly against them, I think they have re-invented Microsoft Fakes, and PostSharp, only badly.
  • skissane 1y ago
    From your link: [InterceptsLocation("/Users/khalidabuhakmeh/RiderProjects/ConsoleApp12/ConsoleApp12/Program.cs", line: 3, character: 3)] they added a language feature which is sensitive to precise line/character offsets in your source code, so the tiniest change to the source code invalidates your code… I’m speechless. Whatever they are aiming to achieve here, surely there is a more elegant, less ugly way
    • poizan42 1y ago
      You are not supposed to use interceptors in code you write yourself. The feature exists for Roslyn Source Generators that runs every time you build the code.
      • ninkendo 1y ago
        I’m still confused though, if you’re generating the code anyway, why do you need an interceptor? Can’t you just generate the code to match what you want to redirect to, directly inline?
        • poizan42 1y ago
          Yes if all the code was generated. The problem is when you want to modify the behavior of user-supplied code - Roslyn Source Generators are additive so you cannot make modifications directly to user-supplied code. You can read about how they work here: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/features/incremental-generators.md https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/features/inc... Basically they get the files (and ambient metadata) that are part of the compilation, filter to the parts it depends on, transforms to a in-mem representation of the data needed for the code generation, and then finally adds new files to the compilation. Since they can only add new files they cannot e.g. add code to be executed before or after user code is executed like with AOP. Interceptors are a solution to that problem.
          • ninkendo 1y ago
            Interesting, so you’re saying generated code can change the behavior of user code with no indication this is happening from directly reading the user code… that sounds pretty horrifying. I guess AOP in general is pretty horrifying to me though. Maybe it’s useful if you restrict its use to very specific things like logging or something.
            • poizan42 1y ago
              Well yes, hopefully you know what you are doing when you reference a source generator. This could ofc. also be done with custom msbuild task that modfies the code sent to the compiler or the assembly after compilation (like Fody), Source Generators just makes the process more streamlined and integrates with things like IntelliSense.
• anyfoo 1y ago
  COBOL has an almost-COME-FROM, its called “ALTER” and it changes the destination of a GO TO, but it’s “discouraged” nowadays.
  • skissane 1y ago
    Historically, COBOL has had some rather fascinatingly unusual features-my favourite is OPEN INPUT REVERSED, which opens files for reading backwards-not sure if this was ever in any of the COBOL standards, but it exists in IBM mainframe COBOL, and many implementations on other platforms have copied it from there. It usually only works for files with fixed length records, and reads the records in reverse sequential order, but the bits/bytes within the record in forward order. In theory, it could be made to work for variable-length record files as well, but I’m not aware of any implementation which does. The original motivation was to support reading magnetic tapes backwards, so you could write data to a tape, then read it back in without a time-consuming rewind - which was important in the early years of computing, when memory and disk sizes were so small, magnetic tapes were commonly used for temporary storage / work files. Most tape drives nowadays don’t support reading tapes backwards, even though there are standard SCSI commands defined to do so-but I believe IBM 3592 tape drive series still supports this, as do virtual tape servers targeted at mainframes. The drive physically reads the bits off the tape in reverse order, but then reverses the data before sending it to the computer. I’m not aware of any other language which supports reading files backwards, other than COBOL. Well, mainframe assembly does, and you can invoke the relevant mainframe IO calls from languages such as C-but COBOL is the only language I know of which has it as a language feature.
    • rbanffy 1y ago
      > I’m not aware of any other language which supports reading files backwards, other than COBOL. You can always use seek() and read(). Won’t work for variable length records, but open(file).readlines()[::-1] should work in Python (even though it’s cheating under the hood).
      • skissane 1y ago
        Those are ways of emulating reading files backward using other language features, not explicit language features for reverse-reading of files. Actually now I realise z/OS stdio has support for backwards-reading of VSAM files: you can fopen with mode “r,type=record,acc=bwd” and “acc=bwd” sets file read direction to reverse. And you can put an open type=record file in reverse reading mode by calling flocate() with __KEY_LAST, __KEY_EQ_BWD, etc But going just by the docs, that only works for VSAM not BSAM. Whereas COBOL’s OPEN INPUT REVERSED definitely works for BSAM, but not sure if it works for VSAM