Expression closures - use-cases for shortcut lambda syntax(blocks)

[Lars T Hansen]

On 3/20/07, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:
> On Mar 20, 2007, at 4:38 PM, Jeff Dyer wrote:
>
> > The => is a deal breaker for me. It looks foreign in the context of
> > the
> > function keyword.
>
> Yeah, having let or function *and* the => is a bit much (but I still
> recall you wanting = at first in the same role for expression
> closures ;-).
>
> As Lars points out it requires bottom up parsing or a trivial mod to
> formal top-down parsing to cope. But we have other such syntactic
> exceptions to our top-down C-like heritage. I'm not sure this should
> matter.

I've started wondering how trivial that mod actually is; the parser
must be prepared to cope with type annotations in there:

   (a,b:int):int => a+b

so any paren expression will effectively be parsed twice: once to
accumulate comma-separated possibly-annotated expressions, and a
second time to figure it out once we know how to interpret it.  Still
not a show-stopper, I know.

> >> Note I'm not opposed to punctuation / special syntax in general; the
> >> object/array initializers are obviously better than their more
> >> "general" counterparts.  I'm just not convinced that that's the case
> >> for function expressions, which are already quite succinct in ES3.
> >
> > Let expressions strengthen the case for statement-less function
> > expressions. But let's be clear, both new forms exist for aesthetics
> > only. They do nothing that isn't already being done by ES3 function
> > expressions.
>
> It's not just aesthetics. Aesthetics is the science of beauty, but
> usability is what users grok -- not always what is beautiful. IOW,
> the pile of "function" keywords in the Y combinator:
>
> function Y(le) {
>      return function (f) {
>          return f(f);
>      }(function (f) {
>          return le(function (x) {
>              return f(f)(x);
>          });
>      });
> }
>
> may be both ugly and unusable, scaled to higher degree of lambda
> usage. We can make it prettier by supporting expression closures as
> proposed (no { return and } noise), and more usable. But would it be
> perhaps most usable, even if uglier by some tastes, to use syntax
> such as => instead of the leading function?

The Y combinator is not even remotely a compelling use case  for
ECMAScript.  ;-)  More compelling are those that have already been
posted in this thread, and as I wrote before, I didn't find those very
compelling either.

--lars