[Grace-core] comments from Philippe & UBC

[Kim Bruce]

On May 12, 2013, at 5:30 PM, James Noble <kjx at ecs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:

> Hi 
> 
> last week I talked about Grace at UBC, hosted by Philippe Kruchten - and here are some
> comments from my notes about the talk and good discussions with Philippe afterwards.
> I'd hoped to do this on wednesday, but... so it goes.
> 
> ...
> 
> * Question: can people redefine while
> - I said: not without explicitly overriding it, and a dialect checker could check it explicitly

It is from the outer scope.  I gather we still have not agreed as to whether or not we allow items to be redefined from the outer scope.  I assume that if we do then the inner definition would scope out the outer one.  I believe Andrew was against having a "final" annotation, but something like that might be handy for dialects.

> 
> * Exceptions 
> - we've got 'em, I didn't get to my slide about them either time
> 
> * Concurrency
> - we don't want to bake anything in to the language, but use libraries or dialects
> - it's hard when we're compiling to JavaScript to do this at all
> 
> * Why were there "brackets around {return 0}" ?
> - (perhaps I should fix that slide to move the brackets closer to the else)

I assume that is part of a method definition.  If so, then it is because it is not evaluated until the method request.  By the way, we are dropping the "return"s.
> 
> * x vs x:= what's the story there?...
> - same as Scala/Newspeak/Self, I think. although that's only partly right. 
> - there is  a question as to whether we allow a space after the name, before the :=
>     if assignment is a method name, we don't usually allow spaces in method names

I never liked this because it is contrary to all our other naming rules.  Personally I'd make people write their own setter methods, as in many cases it is the wrong thing to have setters.  (I can live with the getters as they actually follow our naming rules.)

Kim