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  • marcos@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 months ago

    Good, now invent a keyword for variables you don’t want to declare the type. And now that you have a mix of keywords and identifiers on the same place, you can never update your language again.

    Also, make the function declarations not use a keyword too, so you get the full C-style madness of code that changes meaning depending on what libraries you import.

    • stingpie@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      I don’t understand how not using a keyword to define a function causes the meaning to change depending on imports. I’ve never run into an issue like that before. Can you give an example?

      • marcos@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        Some declarations terminate on the name, other declarations go one requiring more tokens. In C, the only thing that differentiates them is the type.

        Parenthesis in particular are completely ambiguous. But asterisks and square brackets also create problems.

          • sushibowl@feddit.nl
            1·
            3 months ago

            The basic problem is that identifiers can be either types or variables, and without a keyword letting you know what kind of statement you’re dealing with, there’s no way of knowing without a complete identifier table. For example, what does this mean:

            foo * bar;

            If foo is a type, that is a pointer declaration. But if it’s a variable, that’s a multiplication expression. Here’s another simple one:

            foo(bar);

            Depending on how foo is defined, that could be a function call or a declaration of a variable bar of type foo, with some meaningless parentheses thrown in.

            When you mix things together it gets even more crazy. Check this example from this article:

            foo(*bar)();

            Is bar a pointer to a function returning foo, or is foo a function that takes a bar and returns a function pointer?

            let and fn keywords solve a lot of these ambiguity problems because they let the parser know what kind of statement it’s looking at, so it can know whether identifiers in certain positions refer to types or variables. That makes parsing easier to write and helps give nicer error messages.

  • DreamButt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Because sometimes that let can be replaced by other things like const. Which can be managed statically by the machine and not by my (imperfect) ability to know if it’s mutated or not

  • glorkon@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 months ago
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  ENOUGH TALK
  TALK TO THE HAND a
YOU HAVE BEEN TERMINATED