Re: lambda, ->, haskell, and so on

On Wed, 14 May 2008, David A. Black wrote:
> On Wed, 14 May 2008, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In message "Re: lambda, ->, haskell, and so on"
>>    on Wed, 14 May 2008 00:07:37 +0900, "David A. Black" 
<[e-mail]> writes:
>>
>> |> Personally, I am pretty well satisfied with current ->.  In 
addition,
>> |> if both Ruby and Perl6 have it (in same syntax), it will soon have
>> |> large mind share in the dynamic language "market".
>> |
>> |I guess... but then the same is true of all the Perl globals, and
>> |anything else that Ruby and Perl both use.
>>
>> That's weird logic.  Not everything in Perl(6) is bad or ugly.
>> If it's good, it's good.  If it's bad, it's VERY bad.
>
> I don't mean it's all bad; I'm just thinking about the overall dynamic
> language market concept. If Ruby and Perl sharing syntax means that it
> gets lots of mind share, then that will happen whether the syntax is
> good or bad.

Hi, I just want to chime in against "->" as well. I see a couple problems 
with it.

First off, it already means something specific in well-established 
languages such as Perl5 and C/C++.  On my team, I have C++ coders that dip 
into Ruby (and vice-versa), and I really don't want to deal with "->" 
confusion.  Most other pieces of syntax are easy to overcome, but "->" is 
nearly as pervasive as "+".

Second, there are a couple alternatives that we could use, leveraging 
existing Ruby syntax: 

        http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/16662
        http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/16616

Third, we don't have many special sigils left in ASCII land (which is 
really where the codebase needs to stay for compatibility).  Once "->" is 
used, it can't be used it for anything else. This is how Perl 6 got into 
such trouble: They wanted to change some special chars (eg, "."), but this 
resulted in a cascade of sigil changes, which basically ditched Perl 
compat completely.

Please let's learn from Perl 6's mistakes and not repeat them in Ruby 2.0. 
 Thanks for listening.

Nate Wiger
PlayStation