Thanks for the comments! This really seems like an improvement over my original idea.
I'm glad you think so. I try to make my suggestions as nonprescriptive as possible, though (in full disclosure) I'm liable to lead you in circles back to prefix notation if you follow them too far. :P
It was that or lose <=, etc.
Oh, duh. Move along, nothing to see here!
Only remaining special-cases: '...', and ':' at start of sym is part of the sym.
I'm really okay with ..., because it doesn't feel like a "special case" as much as it does a built-in keyword; I wouldn't expect to be able to redefine fn or if, either. I don't really have an opinion on the :keyword symbols.
(f a + b) => (f (+ a b))
but:
(- a + b) => (+ (- a) b)
Is that weird?
Maybe, maybe not. It's not like every other language doesn't do mixfix with their "infix" notation. I just wasn't sure how it worked. Do you declare that certain operators are prefix? Or are they all potentially prefix, like
( mixfix a b ... ) --> ( ( mixfix a ) b ... )
where mixfix is any operator, a and b are any normal token, and ... is 0 or more tokens? Or something like that?
x-1.0
What's the intuitive way to parse this?
I'd say as subtraction of a float: (- x 1.0). If nothing else, I can't imagine a reason to do ((- x 1) 0).
Is it worth getting right, or should we just say, "don't use floats with infix"?
My gut reaction is that it's worth getting right, because programming languages shouldn't be ambiguous.
I notice that a lot of these problems seem to come from using the dot. Thinking back about ssyntax now, it occurs to me that the dot is probably the least-used among them, in Arc. If I were to guess from my own code, I'd rank their usage descending as ~, :, !, ., &. But hey, we can put numbers to that:
Mind you, it's been awhile, so I have no clue what all is in my personal ~/arc directory. Probably various experiments and output from things like sscontract (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11179) and so on. All the same, the dot is low on the totem pole. I personally wouldn't be heartbroken to have to write (f x) instead of f.x, and you could reclaim the regular dotted list syntax. Would it be worthwhile to backtrack at this point and get !, :, and ~ functionality without worrying about .? There were some existing issues with ! and : (name collisions). ~ is prefix, but if you have a way of extending the infix notation for subtraction, surely it would apply to ~? Related thought: f ~ g could replace the f:~g you were worried about before.
Anyway, just some random thoughts off the top of my head. Do what you will with them.
Yeah you're right that using period as both an infix op and inside floats is kinda messy. I use it a lot more than you, so I'm still going through the five stages of grief in giving it up. In the meantime I've hacked together support for floats. Basically, the reader tries to greedily scan in a float everytime it encounters a sym-op boundary. Some increasingly weird examples:
Perhaps this is reasonable. We have a rule that's simple to explain, whose implications can be subtle to work out, but which programmers are expected to exercise taste in using. That could describe all of lisp.
"We have a rule that's simple to explain, whose implications can be subtle to work out, but which programmers are expected to exercise taste in using. That could describe all of lisp."
I don't think the syntax for numbers is very easy to explain. That's the weak link, IMO.
If it were me, I'd have no number literals, just a tool for translating number-like symbols into numbers. Of course, that approach would make arithmetic even less readable. :)
I think the next simplest option is to treat digits as a separate partition of characters like the partitions for infix and non-infix. Digits are sufficient to represent unsigned bigints with a simple syntax. Then most of the additional features of C's float syntax could be addressed by other operators:
-20.002e23
==>
(neg (20.@1002 * 10^23))
This hackish .@ operator, which simulates a decimal point, could be defined in Arc as follows:
(def dot-at (a b)
(while (<= 2 b)
(zap [/ _ 10] b))
(+ a (- b 1)))
You could avoid the need for this hack by treating . as a number character, but then you lose it as an operator.
