return when desugaring to closures
Dave Herman
dherman at ccs.neu.edu
Sat Oct 11 16:33:09 PDT 2008
On Oct 11, 2008, at 7:13 PM, Mark S. Miller wrote:
> Cool! So why are we still discussing proposed let expressions and let
> blocks as distinct constructs?
I'm open to just having a single form, which is an expression whose
body is a statement. In fact, waaaaay back (about 2 to 2.5 years ago)
the original proposal I wrote for `let' was a single form which was an
expression whose body was a block. And it used the completion value.
It spun off into the let declaration form (which I personally think is
a good thing) but without `lambda' it seemed more natural to have
separate expression and statement forms.
I am most definitely in favor of steps towards unifying statements and
expressions, and I think the completion value is the glue between
them. It'll never be a perfect marriage, because some C-isms are just
so darned imperative (e.g., switch cases requiring break; e.g., loop
forms working via mutation), and C's expression forms are so clunky
(e.g., ?:). But those are minor warts compared to the benefit of
taking advantage of the completion value.
> How about just
>
> Expression ::= ... | lambda Formals? Block
>
> ?
Or even
Expression ::= ... | lambda Formals? Statement
as Yuh-Ruey suggested. I don't know if that causes nasty ambiguities,
but I'm open to it. Also, the expression-body form falls out naturally
as an instance of ExpressionStatement.
[Hm, one ambiguity is "lambda(x)(x)" could be read as either a
headless lambda with the body (x) being applied to (x) or as a headful
lambda with the body (x). I'm not in love with the optional formals,
since it doesn't have Smalltalk's incredibly lightweight syntax. I
think being able to leave off the formals list is the biggest win when
the syntax for closures is ultra-cheap. Otherwise the savings of the
two characters '(' ')' isn't really that important.]
Dave
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