[bitc-dev] White space

[wren ng thornton]

Ben Kloosterman wrote:
> Disclosure My functional experience is limited to Lisp and Ocaml and the
> learning curve was steep...and hence my comments :-)

You should try Haskell. The learning curve is certainly steep, but the 
results and the rewards are much nicer.


>  >Often, succinctness breeds legibility. By reducing syntactic overhead,
>  >readers can focus on the real content of the code.
> 
> In C like languages this is the case but in functional languages the symbols
> are key to the logic eg Ocaml
> map and match are ok but 
> 
> ::  ,   --> ,    and |>  etc are key to the logic and don't read easily or
> naturally.

With how ubiquitous lists are in functional languages, I'd think that 
(a::b::c::zs) is preferable to (Cons a (Cons b (Cons c zs))). Are you 
suggesting we say (Pair x y) instead of (x,y) ?

Certainly people will differ in where they draw the line between nice 
and succinct vs line noise. But I don't think that eschewing symbolic 
function names is really the solution. That way lies LISP. While the 
Lispers and Schemers will defend s-expressions to their death, that has 
been and continues to be one of the major impediments for people 
adopting languages in that tradition.

-- 
Live well,
~wren