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1 point by stefano 6007 days ago | link | parent

I didn't have in mind assignment. I was thinking at functions such as append that desctructively use their arguments. In Scheme such a function is called "append!", in CL "nconc" but in Arc there is no standard naming.


1 point by absz 6007 days ago | link

In that case, you want the zap macro:

  (zap join x '(a b c))
zap turns into, more or less,

  (= x (join x '(a b c)))
Its signature is (op place . args), so all the arguments are optimized.

However, we do need naming conventions; zap, though multipurpose, is still not completely general. And there are no good ones, unfortunately.

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1 point by stefano 6006 days ago | link

The problem is that when using join with zap you need to cons a lot of memory, while a destructive join would not cons up memory, it would just traverse the list setting the right cdrs. Probably the expression "recycling operations" describes better what I wanted to say, because operations such as nconc reuse the memory of their arguments.

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1 point by almkglor 6007 days ago | link

my suggestion: D!join

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1 point by stefano 6006 days ago | link

This would mean to have a huge hash table containing all destructive operations, and that a lookup in that table would be necessary just to call a function. A namespace system (such that of CL) would be the right thing, because names in such a system are resolved before runtime.

(d::join ...)

The character #\: has been already taken, though. Maybe a good name would be (d/join ...). What do you think?

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1 point by almkglor 6005 days ago | link

Depends. If we accept the modification in http://arclanguage.com/item?id=7451 , it would be possible to make modules into a macro, and D!join would be resolved during macro-expansion into a 'uniq that can be 'symeval -ed to the destructive join operation.

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1 point by absz 6006 days ago | link

/ would be problematic, though, as we already have things like w/uniq, w/stdin, /, etc. I like Scheme's convention, so what about

  (add-ssyntax-bottom ; Or perhaps -top
    #\! (sym:string 'L #\!))
? This would allow us to use !s in the final position of a function name, e.g. join!.

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1 point by almkglor 6005 days ago | link

This makes:

  (join! foo bar)
into:

  ((sym:string 'join #\!) foo bar)
which doesn't seem to be what you want.

As an aside, you might want to try this on Anarki:

  (require "ssyntaxes.arc")
  (def foo! (x)
    (= (cdr x) 42)
    x)
  (= bar '(1 2))
  (foo! bar)

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1 point by absz 6005 days ago | link

That's what I would have thought, but it appeared to work. Though it may only have worked because of your second observation. And given that, I will repeat my desire for the destructive! custom. I like it because it doesn't interfere with any name (e.g. how alist could be association list or the "is the object a list?" predicate [though that's a bad example, you get the idea]), it has seen use in multiple languages, and it pretty clearly says what it means (assuming you want to encourage functional programming, as I think we do).

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2 points by almkglor 6005 days ago | link

I suggest running a poll on this - of course, pg probably won't care either way, but we can integrate his code into Anarki next time he bothers to release an update, ne?

I think this convention is good; I'm just somewhat concerned with the fact that foo!bar is plenty overloaded.

edit: IIRC this has been suggested a few times before already, so I think there'll be good support for this - but it means we will then have to formally standardize the ssyntaxes too.

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2 points by stefano 6005 days ago | link

Poll added :)

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