* general pleasntries and discussions of machines
* talk about the Lang.NEXT talk
* questions for talk
- who will be there
- what will they do
* issues in language design
- the "big assumption" things that are good for software engineering
are also good for teaching, also good for debugging, als good for research
this is clearly not true in general, but we hope there is a big sweet spot in practice
- semantic consistency / simplicity vs syntatic consistency / simplicity
- e.g syntax / precedence - why some precedence but not all
a good example case
- james says: it's not just backwards compatibility, also "forwards compatibility"
in that our students need to go on to other languages
"knowledge" of the language, but *also* "getting your eye in" to
curly bracket syntax - the tacit, implicit skill for navigating that kind of syntax.
the syntactic background noise that transfers from C to Java to C++ to C# to
(and via our indentation rules) to python too
- should be trivial to move from Grace to Scala (hmm)
* talked about square brackets
* talked briefly about generalized method definition / request
* talked briefly about access control:
uses vs inherits from…
* talked about tuples / multiple variable returns.
vacillated
* talked about pattern matching…
Kim suggested if we want destructuring we should also have multiple returns
* next meeting will be week beginning 9 march;
aiming to meeting thursday US 5th 13:30-15:30, friday 6th 8:30-10:30?
James