[Grace-core] On numbers and objects

[James Noble]

> I would strongly favour =.

OK...

> Event though it is different from pointer equality, the whole point  
> is that this is Grace's definition of *equality*. There should not  
> be equality AND egal -- equality should BE egal.

absolutely!!

> And I think it's time to clean up the == nonsense.

OK. Apart from compatibility/legibility (which *is* important)
"==" looks less like ":="  than plain "=" does.

> (That then gets into conflict with using = for let definitions -- I  
> would favour dropping the distinction between = for let and := for  
> var.

hmm, they're there as a relic from an earlier design where they  
keywords weren't required (or worked differently)

> That's a detail where language design detail hits through to the  
> detriment of usability.
> It's technically sensible, and provides little useful purpose in  
> practice.)

the thing is the assignment operator is (currently design as)  ":="
I guess lets could also use ":="  - is that your suggestion?
Although we've flirted with using = Scala/ML style in function  
definitions,
it will look odd there going to ":="

there are no perfect choices!

> We should mark each comment line as a comment, so we need only to- 
> the-end-of-line comments.

Hm: again, I'd like to see the design of annotations before finishing  
things here.
Annotations won't necessarily sense with end-of-line syntax.

> And applying block comments becomes an IDE function, not a language  
> construct.

of course.

> What I would like to see, though, is a differentiation between  
> interface (documentation) comments and internal (implementation)  
> comments.

again, we need to look more at this, there's certainly at least one
blog-posts's-worth in comments (& annotations)

J