[chuck-users] wishlist for the new year

[Hans Aberg]

On 10 Jan 2010, at 22:38, mike clemow wrote:

>> You are sort of reinventing the wheel, or at least (Standard) ML,  
>> here. See
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)
>
>  We're not reinventing the wheel so much as exploring how certain  
> features might be added to the Chuck language--features that appear  
> in many other languages (JavaScript, Haskell, Python, and ML too).   
> I mean, LISP did this stuff before any of the others...

I just meant that the things you are experimenting with have already  
been done - there would be problem to add it. Easier. :-)

One needs to figure out how to add a type system. But if one scraps  
the Hindley-Milner type system, at least in the global form it appears  
in SML and Haskell, there would be less of a problem.

> I think it's great to look at the way other languages do things as  
> examples, but we're not about to re-make the Chuck system using  
> Haskell syntax or LISP, or ML.  It's highly likely that Chuck will  
> get new features, but the ones it gets will be the ones that seem  
> most important to the devs and the community, I suppose.

Sorry, I treated the actual syntax as irrelevant - it should of course  
be ChucKish, but what works can be found out when plugging into the .y  
grammar file. So I thought of x |-> f or \x -> f or fn x => f or  
(lambda x f) as merely different ways to say the same thing.

One can in Haskell use a syntax closer to your:
   bing :: Num a => a -> a -> a
   bing b = funk
     where funk i = b + i
It says essentially the same as
   fun fun int bing(int b) {
      fun int funk(int i) { return b+i; }
      return funk;
   }
though strictly speaking, the return type is "fun int (int)" or  
something.

The problem is probably not adding functions as objects, but finding a  
good type system, especially when polymorphy is added.

   Hans