[bitc-dev] Types that introduce new literals

[John Zabroski]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 2:15 PM, John Zabroski <johnzabroski at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 7:44 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <shap at eros-os.org>wrote:
>
>> Other than bit sets and enumerations, what **commonly used** types want to
>> introduce new, named literals?
>>
>> [and unions, for constructors]
>>
>> shap
>>
>>
> If you are asking about programming languages in general, then "syntax for
> hashes" has to be up there.  Common Lisp has keyword lists, and Ruby has
> keyword identifiers that as I recall were borrowed from that language.
>
> When programmers don't have syntax for hashes, I've seen them do dumb
> things to abuse the production rules and semantics of the language.  For
> example, the ASP.NET MVC team at Microsoft did the extremely foul sin of
> abusing new language features like anonymous classes to approximate Ruby's
> keyword identifiers and how Ruby on Rails makes use of them.  There are
> other examples I can think of, but this one is fairly prominent and
> amusing.  As a consequence of this stupid hijacking of language constructs,
> most of the APIs in the ASP.NET MVC trunk are not readable (in my humble
> opinion) because they contain gratuitous overloads to handle situations
> where the programmer passes in any old Object type, and the MVC runtime then
> uses .NET reflection to treat attribute names as keyword identifiers, and
> the attribute values as the coinciding mapped value.
>
> This is obviously really gross to any mathematician, and I would argue
> demonstrates that a language designer needs to know a lot about its users to
> design a good syntax for them.
>
> Cheers,
> Z-Bo
>
>
Let me rephrase this to answer more directly:

Dictionary types "want" [1] to introduce new, named literals.  Programmers
commonly call these literals "syntax for hashes".

Cheers,
Z-Bo

[1] Well, I have never met a type that "wanted" to do anything for me.
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