Allen's lambda syntax proposal

[Yuh-Ruey Chen]

Yuh-Ruey Chen wrote:
> Brendan Eich wrote:
>> C# uses (a, b, c) => ... but in JS the comma operator makes that
>> nasty to parse top-down. I think the only candidates have to be of
>> the form
>>
>> ^(a, b, c) {...}
>>
>> (^ could be another character, but it seems to beat \ as others have
>> noted), or else the Smalltalky
>>
>> { |a, b, c| ... }
>>
>> At this point we need a bake-off, or a convincing argument against
>> the unusual vertical bar usage.
>
> Here's a possible technical issue that might not apply to ES: Ruby
> blocks params can't have default arguments according to
> http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?Changes+in+Ruby+1.9#l9 :
>
>     The new syntax allows to specify default values for block
>     arguments, since
>
>      {|a,b=1| ... } 
>       
>
>     is said to be impossible with Ruby's current LALR(1) parser, built
>     with bison.
>

That Ruby 1.9 page also lists yet another possible syntax:

->(a, b, ...) {...}

Using Maciej's examples:

if_ (->{x < 3}, ->{
    handleSmallNum(x);
}, ->{
    handleLargeNum(x);
});

while_ (->{x != null}, ->{
   x.process();
   x = x.next();
});

for_ (->{var i = 1}, ->{i < 10}, ->{i++}, ->{
    total += vec[i];
});

forIn_ (obj, ->(prop) {
    props.push(prop);
});

arr.sort(->(a, b) { a*a < b*b });
arr.map(->(x) { x * (x-1)});

function doubleBs(str) {
    str.replace(/b*/, ->(substr) { substr + substr });
}

The control abstractions just don't look right, regardless of which
lambda syntax we choose. I'd rather wait for a more powerful macro
system, instead of choosing the syntax based off how it would look in
control abstractions.
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