Re: Brave new world

Eduardo Cavazos <wayo.cavazos@...> wrote:
>  One of the onions in Factor world (to me anyway) has been the dilemma of
>  finding the "one true effect". Even when you find the supposed "one true
>  effect", there are still exceptional cases which require an accompanying
>  shuffle word.

>  I'm going a different route, embracing the diversity of effects instead of
>  rejecting it. The way down this route is to give names to each variant.

One problem with this approach is that it dramatically increases
information load, both for reading and writing; and as with the
examples you give, the names are not related to each other, and
there's no reason to /a priori/ choose one over the other.

Another approach -- which I'm not going to advocate, but want to
discuss before we commit to the above approach -- would be to provide
language syntax to allow words to optionally take parameters that
indicate the order of their inputs on the stack, OR to name words so
that their parameters are part of the name (rather than to name them
using arbitrary names).

       TUPLE: planet name radius solar-radius ;
       <planet> :name "Mars" is<col,key,val>
       <planet> 100 :radius  is<col,val,key>
       2000 :solar-radius <planet> is<key,val,col>

The choice of which characters to use to indicate that parameter
ordering is being specified is for the experienced community to
decide, not me (a total newbie).

And finally, of course, we'd provide a plain old undecorated word with
a "normal" parameter ordering. And hopefully, most people would use
it, because both of these ideas are, frankly, an eyesore. I'd rather
see an occasional 'swap' than see either one of our ideas regularly
used (let that stand as my personal argument against seeing either
form of this idea implemented).

>  Ed

-Wm

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference 
Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. 
Use priority code J8TL2D2. 
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone