On 05/09/2011 07:45 PM, Warp wrote:

>    The lack of separators is also confusing to someone who is accustomed to
> programming languages that use separators.

Don't try Lisp. ;-) (Or Smalltalk. Or Tcl. Or...)

Anyway, just for giggles, I wanted to see if I could hack the language 
hard enough to make it support separators. The answer is... yeah, kinda.

   insert|< 5 # my_heap >|j

I can't get it to use a comma, colon, semicolon or any similarly 
separator-like symbol, since these are all reserved symbols. The best I 
could manage is #, @, $ or similar. (I did try more unusual Unicode 
symbols, but that crashed the compiler - ridiculously enough...)

Obviously, the way I did this was to define some new operators. I could 
have gone for

   insert< 5 # my_heap >j

except that "<" and ">" are already in use. (You can reuse them... but 
would you want to?)

You may also notice the stray "j" at the end. That's not a semicolon, 
it's the letter J. Haskell doesn't support unary operators, only binary. 
So the final >| must have two operands. It actually ignores the second one.

The code is quite simple:

   f |< x = f x
   f #  x = f x
   x >| y = x
   j = undefined

That's literally it.

Post a reply to this message