<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">James,<div><br></div><div>The thing that you refer to as “built in sequence” is not part of the Grace language. You may be confused because minigrace still accepts it; </div><div>that’s because the minigrace compiler still uses it, and when I took it out, the compiler slowed down unacceptably. </div><div>Removing it altogether is still on my list, but not a really high priority.</div><div><br></div><div>If we make various kinds of brackets user-definable methods, then we could have uniform syntax <i>and</i> use [ ] for sequences. But that would mean using more brackets, which you don’t like doing … although there are lots of them.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Andrew</div><div><br>On 24 May 2015, at 19:34, James Noble <<a href="mailto:kjx@ecs.vuw.ac.nz">kjx@ecs.vuw.ac.nz</a>> wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">varargs vs collection-passing:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">You'd need a strong motivation to get rid of them.<br></blockquote><br>well I always have dreams about getting rid of stuff (so I can put in MORE OTHER STUFF)<br><br><blockquote type="cite">Hitherto there has been opposition to collection literals, so that approach was<br>impractical, and it's less pleasant to work with anyway.<br></blockquote><br>If there weren’t objections to collection literals, what do you see are the other disadvantages vs varargs? <br><br>Andrew wrote: <br><br><blockquote type="cite">Variable arity methods also make the syntax seen by the requester more uniform. The requestor writes set.with(4, 5, 6), list.with(4, 5, 6) and sequence.with(4, 5, 6) rather than set.with[4, 5, 6], list.with[4, 5, 6] and [4, 5, 6]. <br></blockquote><br>sure, although really I guess nonuniformity is <br><br>[4, 5, 6] // built in sequence<br>list.with [4, 5, 6] // list <br>set.with [4, 5, 6] // set… <br><br>or with factory methods / non-dotted classes: <br><br>[4, 5, 6] // built in sequence<br>list [4, 5, 6] // list <br>set [4, 5, 6] // set… <br><br>or with one sort of magic:<br><br>collect [4, 5, 6]<br>collect [([4, 5, 6 ])] <br>collect [{[ 4, 5, 6 ]}] <br><br>or another sort of magic<br><br>[4, 5, 6]<br>[([ 4, 5, 6 ])] <br>[{[ 4, 5, 6 ]}] <br><br>which do we prefer? <br><br>J <br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Grace-core mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Grace-core@cecs.pdx.edu">Grace-core@cecs.pdx.edu</a><br>https://mailhost.cecs.pdx.edu/mailman/listinfo/grace-core<br></blockquote><br></div></body></html>