Re: blah blah blah can't hear you

Neil Madden wrote:

>> FWIW, I think that your maybe package is very interesting, and the 
>> implementation is clever in the way you store values. However I don't 
>> like the maybe/just/nothing terminology, as it sounds too foreign to 
>> Tcl. If I can make the following suggestion that I think is more 
>> Tclish as far as the syntax is concerned: use {} (a 0-sized list) for 
>> nothing, and {value} (a 1-sized list) for Just. Hence:
>>
>>     set l { {a} {} {{}} }
>>
>> is a 3-sized list whose 2nd element is null and 3rd is the empty 
>> string, encoded as {{}}
> 
> That is, of course, a possibility for the string rep. I have to call the 
> constructors something, though. In which case, I'd prefer the string 
> reps to match the constructor names; it makes it clear where the values 
> have come from and makes it less likely to accidentally forget to unwrap 
> a value.

That's a good point. I have no problem with Nothing (or Unknown or 
whatever), however Maybe and Just sound odd. Of course it makes sense 
when you know Haskell, but the vast majority of people who don't would 
certainly find this choice puzzling. But anyway that's a matter of taste.

May I also suggest that your package be a sub-package of a larger 
meta-package "functional", perhaps included in the tcllib sometimes? 
E.g. "package functional::maybe". Functional programming is a very 
powerful paradigm and a good fit with Tcl's immutable, transparent, COW 
values, so it would make sense to import all these concepts from a 
central place.

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