Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
2 points by akkartik 4404 days ago | link | parent

"Programmers should manage their namespaces with care."

Totally. I think I'm closer to your point of view than anybody here (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=15587, footnote 1; http://arclanguage.org/item?id=12777). I've gradually moved to the dark side in several ways: I no longer care about hygiene[1] or making macros easy to compile[2]. But I still hold on to lexical scope for reasons I can't fully articulate. If unit tests are as great as I say they are, do we need lexical scope? Without them changes may break seemingly distant, unrelated code. Something to think about.

[1] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=15907, especially the http://arclanguage.org/item?id=15913 subtree.

[2] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=13585; http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=14947; http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=13319.



1 point by FredBrach 4404 days ago | link

>> If unit tests are as great as I say they are, do we need lexical scope?

Very very interesting. Unit testing.. This is such an engineering concept. Why not built in the language with meta tags (I don't know if it's possible at all)?

>> Without them changes may break seemingly distant, unrelated code. Something to think about.

Let's try the fun of an extreme code expansion language without any compromise :)

-----