simple shorter function syntax

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Jul 24, 2010, at 11:51 AM, Mark S. Miller wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Oliver Hunt <oliver at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> On Jul 23, 2010, at 10:32 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:
> 
> > On Jul 23, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
> >
> > [Good point about LL(∞) snipped.]
> >
> >> *  To give you an idea of how important parsing is, the 280 North folk once told me that parsing made up 25% of the load time for 280 Slides.
> >
> > Ollie, was that with browser-side Objective-J compilation, or with the server translating and feeding the Obj-J-lowered-to-JS code to the browser?
> 
> I believe it was with the browser being passed preprocessed source, but i'll harass them to find out.
> 
> > I have polled audiences at talks in the last year about shorter function syntax, see first two links at http://brendaneich.com/presentations/. Results mainly for fun but somewhat informative (to me at any rate) were not resoundingly in favor of a new and much shorter keyword to use instead of function.
> >
> > This was before http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:shorter_function_syntax was proposed, so I didn't ask the audiences to clap for its # syntax.
> >
> > People like the expression-closure idea, although syntax needs to be hammered out. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/new_in_javascript_1.8#Expression_closures_%28Merge_into_own_page.2fsection%29
> 
> I personally am not too fussed about the reduced typing -- if people really wanted reduced typing we could simply adopt "\" which seems to be the common symbol used for a function.
> 
> The reason I prefer "#" to "\" is simply that JavaScript source text [fragments] frequently appear in literal strings. Right now, the only quoting hazard this introduced is quotes and backslashes in nested literal strings. (Is this true?). If you use backslash in syntax elsewhere in the language, then it becomes an additional quoting hazard that's easy to miss.
> 
> +1 on "#".

Good point about the escaping hazard. I think # may look funny to people because it is a "noisy" symbol and also because it is a comment delimiter in many languages. Two other characters totally disallowed in the syntax are @ and `, I wonder if either of those would be more visually pleasing:

[0, 1, 2, 3].map( #(x) {x * x} )
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( `(x) {x * x} )
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( @(x) {x * x} )

I also wonder if using a strictly binary operator might be workable without creating syntax ambiguities:

[0, 1, 2, 3].map( ^(x) {x * x} )
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( *(x) {x * x} )
[0, 1, 2, 3].map( %(x) {x * x} )


I kind of like ` but it may be too visually subtle and may be confusing to lisp users. @ seems less visually harsh than #. I like ^ for resemblance to lambda, overall visual weight, and alignment with Apple's "blocks" extension to C[1]. I have a vague memory that we discussed ^ before and discarded it, but I can't find that discussion in the archives at the moment.

Perhaps the strawman page for shorter function syntax should list reasons for rejecting other syntax options. I would be happy to document the reasons against fn, fun, f and \, but I can't seem to remember my username and password (I'm not even sure if I have an account). Who can help with wiki access issues?

Regards,
Maciej

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_(C_language_extension)

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