Comments on: Programming language warts: Newspeak

By: dino delellis

dino delellis — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:30:42 +0000

They should make it as easy and compatible as possible , something that people who studied other programming will look at it and say ” Cool , this is familiar “.

This will make the transition for them easier because they don’t have to learn an entirely different set of syntax.

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:25:44 +0000

Hmm… in Smalltalk ^ isn’t used for lambda returns. Or… there’s no lambda, but there are blocks in Smalltalk, but a block evaluates as its last expression, and ^ does a return of the enclosing method definition.

By: Kevin Dangoor

Kevin Dangoor — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:48:07 +0000

And, truth be told, that was the context in which they showed a ^. I still generally prefer things to not be too terse, because too many random characters just looks like line noise (ie is bad for readability, which is important).

I don’t know if Newspeak also offers ‘return’ for longer functions.

By: sky

sky — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:34:10 +0000

I can imagine a short ‘^’ being better for lambdas and other short functions that benefit from concise expression.

By: Kevin Dangoor

Kevin Dangoor — Mon, 12 May 2008 02:19:31 +0000

Aha! OK. For a language like Newspeak, that’s a reasonable precedent to go by, since Smalltalk is clearly an inspiration for them. It does still strike me as odd, though, that they would opt for ^ rather than return while acknowledging that return is more commonly accepted.

Thanks for clearing that up. Smalltalk is one language that I haven’t looked too deeply at.

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Sat, 10 May 2008 14:10:46 +0000

It comes from Smalltalk, which also uses ^ as return (and was traditionally rendered as an up-arrow). At least they don’t use _ for assignment (That was traditionally rendered as a left-pointing arrow)