[Grace-core] Putative Blog Posts

[Kim Bruce]

I agree with most of what has been said, but (on comments) we will still have faculty who insist the only "true" way of programming is to use emacs or vi or whatever old-fashioned technology gets them closer to the way they did it while in diapers (nappies?).  Thus we need something that will work for them.  Moreover, the lovely development environments that we anticipate having will not be around for at least a year or more.  Thus we need something that will work for the next year as we circulate documents.

By the by, I have so far gotten through the first three "Gracenotes".  My comments all have my name associated.  (Is there some easy way to designate our comments in this environment so that they stick out?)  I've also fixed a bunch of typos.  I'll try to get through the rest today.

As for the "top level" blocks.  Perhaps we can more accurately say they are context-dependent since they are nested.  Part of me wants to say they should be written something like " => {...}" if we want closures, but that just seems too damn ugly!

Kim



On Nov 4, 2010, at 12:39 AM, James Noble wrote:

>> I went though and edited the first Blog post (on the wiki), on blocks.  I think that it's fine, with one exception.
> 
> great...
> 
>> That's the  note about comments.  It ignores the discussion that we had about attaching comments to specific syntactic constructs, rather than making them whitespace.
> 
> opps. yes you're right.
> 
>> I really don't want to have to come up with complex rules for deciding which construct a  || (which is more graceful than //) comment applies to.  I want to apply my comments with a programming environment.
> 
> You know I'm sure I saw another discussion of that somewhere -
> I think in the context of Smalltalk - ahh yes, Newspeak spec?
> 
>>> Our general approach is to treat ordinary comments as metadata as well.
>>> That way, they are attached to a known place in the program and are not thrown
>>> away, so they can be preserved during refactoring.
> 
> so your note could mention that...
> 
> anyway: I actually think that's quite uncontroversial, and
> imposes no constraint on the comment design, actually...
> (I remember thinking about this but can't remember why
> I thought this was basically for free :-)
> 
>> I suppose that we need to do a few things.  I need to write a blog post on comments.   And we need to decide if a comment syntax is really necessary, and if so, what it looks like.
> 
> yes and yes.  I'm afraid a comment syntax *is* necessary, for publications,
> for textbooks, and for sending code via email - and we need to have one
> (or a few) consistent syntaxen for it.
> 
> but you should start a note - if you're prefer the comment sections not
> to go into this blog post, then start a new one & copy them there.
> 
> BTW I *love* this line:
>> We all know that syntax is unimportant — in theory. However, it is quite important in practice, because we all have our pet loves and hates. Moreover, to even discuss competing ideas for the more substantive parts of the language, we need a syntax. So, let's start by talking about it
>> 
> 
> it's just great
> 
>> Kim Comments: I'm slightly uncomfortable by having different semantics of blocks depending on whether or not they are at the top level. On the other hand, it gives you the right behavior
>> 
> yep. Fraid so. "top level" is probably a slight misnomer, blocks can be nested etc.
> what they *can't* be is in an argument position - top level of a statement list.
> 
> do you want to say anything else about that?
> 
> Andrew (I think) pointed out that Algol-68 had the same rule, but in a statically
> typed language it gets a nice name related to the type system.
> (looks again, yep its already in the note)
> In a potentially dynamically typed language we only have syntatic context
> so although we have the same rule, and the description is *simpler* - it sounds uglier.
> (arguably because CS discourse has  ignored these kinds of languages)
> but I think it is the Right Thing.
> 
> J
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