An alternative FFI/Parser proposal
stéphane ducasse
ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sun Aug 20 21:26:16 UTC 2006
> Consider SQL, with the open form first, and the pragma form second...
>
> <sql: select * from myTable where name = "Stef" >
> <sql: 'select * from myTable where name = "Stef" '>
>
> Either way, the programmer still needs to know SQL.
Indeed :)
> It could be argued that the syntax could be like this...
>
> <select: '*' from: 'myTable' where: 'name' equals: '"Stef"' >
>
> But add a couple of joins, and make the where clause have some ANDs
> and ORs in
> it, and the whole thing would become a nightmare.
Yes. The point is also to know what is the impact of having such free
forms.
Because this looks to me like a way to defer (I mean define my own
kind of macros)
macros. And I was always skeptical about macros in Smalltalk. I like
them in Scheme but
they do not have late-binding.
> it is the way to introduce scope to the
>> instance variable
>> as in tweak?
>
> I wasn't thinking about that no. Maybe I have missed something, I
> have only a
> basic familiarity with Tweak. Could you expand on that please?
It seems to me (I may be wrong) that in Tweak event clause are
syntactic sugar for
more verbose forms as andreas showed in a previous email. This means
that they can then contains
instance variable and in such as case this is not anymore literal only.
This is even a point to fix before we could adopt sophie (modulo that
what I said is correct).
But in that case <> is really a macro-expansion mechanism. May be
this is needed after all
but I would like to see the real advantage. because may be the
verbose form is good enough.
May be not. Or at least it is nice that we can talk and discuss it
like what we do now and this is not just
a cool hack that we have to use ( to put that in a broader context:
this is somehow related to that issue I
do not like in Tweak the fact that instance variable are defined
using color (because I'm lucky not to be daltonian)
and I hate that the underlying representation of instance variable
contain XML while this is totally unnecessary as I mentioned
loooonnng time ago on the tweak mailing-list --- the smalltalk syntax
is enough to declare property we do not need XML for that). So I
learned to like {} and now I'm trying to understand what are the
deeper implications of what andreas did in the compiler. Because they
affect the language semantics. And the language can/should evolve but
at least we should understand the impact.
Stef
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