Nexus Programming Language

Ruby
41

On Feb 23, 3:21 pm, Eleanor McHugh [email protected]
wrote:

evaluation. I tend to think that the notation should “precede” the
Of course, I don’t think anyone would like the way that would
Sure. But why would anyone want to write something like

is much easier on the eye :slight_smile:

Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brainshttp://slides.games-with-brains.net

raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason

The Nexus (left-to-right) assignment operator ‘^’ is also referred to
as the ‘goes to’ operator. The choice of symbol is meaningful, you
might think of the ‘^’ character as an arrow meaning the value you
just put on the stack (the left side of the expression) ‘goes to’ to
the memory location (i.e. variable) on the right-side of the
expression (i.e. 123^x, 123 ‘goes to’ x).

42

On Feb 23, 2009, at 9:49 PM, Phlip wrote:

Gary W. wrote:

I always liked Eiffel’s choice of := for assignment and
a single = for comparison.

That is just foolish. You assign more often than you compare, hence
you should use the mechanism that’s easier to type.

Foolish? Seems a bit strong.

There are lots of errors caused by = vs ==. How much time is lost in
that regard? I think an hour of debugging time is worth a whole lot
of :'s.

Gary W.

43

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon
[email protected] wrote:

is no implicit operator precedence, the programmer is forced to be
demonstrates explicit operator precedence."

Looks like a cross between Ruby and INTERCAL. When 1.0+2.0/3.0+4.0=5.0,
that’s not a good thing, and will confuse most mathemeticians to no end.
And the use of ^ for assignment will also be very unintuitive.

At the same time, I don’t see any conceptual advantages over Ruby. Just
different, unintutitive, syntax.

Well if you need to talk about no conceptual advantage and just
different unintuitive syntax, you can say the same of Ruby vs. Lisp.

Why are you subscribed to ruby-talk if you hate Ruby so much? Is
someone forcing you to use it? And if so, how is that our problem.

-greg

44

Gregory B. wrote:

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon
…

Well if you need to talk about no conceptual advantage and just
different unintuitive syntax, you can say the same of Ruby vs. Lisp.

Why are you subscribed to ruby-talk if you hate Ruby so much? Is
someone forcing you to use it? And if so, how is that our problem.

-greg

He’s harmless. CL (Commode Lord) is so bloated and hideous
that only a religious zealot would use it.

45

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 02:59:27PM +0900, William J. wrote:

He’s harmless. CL (Commode Lord) is so bloated and hideous
that only a religious zealot would use it.

I . . . don’t think that’s really productive at all. Common Lisp still
has its advantages as a language, even if it’s not the LISP many people
wish it could be.

46

Gary W. wrote:

On Feb 23, 2009, at 9:49 PM, Phlip wrote:

Gary W. wrote:

I always liked Eiffel’s choice of := for assignment and
a single = for comparison.

That dates back to Pascal.

That is just foolish. You assign more often than you compare, hence
you should use the mechanism that’s easier to type.

Foolish? Seems a bit strong.

There are lots of errors caused by = vs ==. How much time is lost in
that regard? I think an hour of debugging time is worth a whole lot
of :'s.

C:

if (over_run = -1)
self_destruct();

I often arrange my comparisons like

if -1 = over_run

47

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 11:49:23AM +0900, Phlip wrote:

Gary W. wrote:

I always liked Eiffel’s choice of := for assignment and
a single = for comparison.

That is just foolish. You assign more often than you compare, hence you
should use the mechanism that’s easier to type.

Actually, depending on the programming style you employ, that may not be
true. The more “functional” your programming style, the less you’re
likely to employ assignments, for instance.

48

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 10:04 PM, William J. [email protected]
wrote:

That dates back to Pascal.
Actually it dates back to Algol. The people who designed it did it for
a reason, but I can’t remember what it was. I think it was to remind
people that assignment was not equality, and the purists pronounce

a := b

as “a becomes b”.

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky

I’ve never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.

49

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 12:59 AM, William J. [email protected]
wrote:

-greg

He’s harmless. CL (Commode Lord) is so bloated and hideous
that only a religious zealot would use it.

Just to clarify… my question was not meant to be patronizing. My
point is that Pascal would probably benefit more by advocating Common
Lisp in more general forums rather than trying to ‘convert’ folks who
are interested in Ruby. I don’t think your flame-bait has helped
support that point at all. That said, kill-files solve problems like
this much faster than long discussions about Netiquette do.

-greg

50

I . . . don’t think that’s really productive at all. Â Common Lisp still
has its advantages as a language, even if it’s not the LISP many people
wish it could be.

Having learned Lisp as Lisp 1.5, I’m much more inclined to Scheme than
Common Lisp, because Scheme fixed a lot of the warts on Lisp 1.5.

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky

I’ve never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.

51

Avatar wrote:

1 2 + 3 / 4 +
notation), but it’s how I feel.
But postfix notation is just so natural: load operands on the stack;

Eleanor McHugh
expression (i.e. 123^x, 123 ‘goes to’ x).

A most fascinating thread, coming from a very distant universe, as I do.

As for this use of “^”, it is about as needless as yet another poem
about a flower. Don’t we already have one, somewhere? I fully realize
that calculation (computer) languages are not poems, but they ARE
containers for thought, and in that they are brothers/sisters to poems.

I’m with Eleanor in loving the exploration of different ways of
thinking/working with stuff (and in having an appreciation for the
elgance of RPN). A large part of the sheer burst of joy that grabbed me
and threw me into the Ruby world, on the occasion of my fifth look at
the language, was the delight I experienced upon finally understanding
that this language was “working” the notion that everything could be an
object, and have access to methods belonging to the class of which it
was a member. The sheer elegance of this was new to me and is still a
very major delight.

So, I have to wonder, when meeting up with a new language, if maybe I’m
about to hear my first Stravinsky ballet, or perhaps run into something
like Spencer Brown’s “Laws of form” (1972). Beauty is found in strange
places. If we’re all lucky, the Nexus project will come up with some
we’ve not seen yet. That would be most excellent, howsoever difficult it
may be to achieve.

Tom

–

Tom C., MS MA, LMHC - Private practice Psychotherapist
Bellingham, Washington, U.S.A: (360) 920-1226
<< [email protected] >> (email)
<< TomCloyd.com >> (website)
<< sleightmind.wordpress.com >> (mental health weblog)
52

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Of course, I don’t think anyone would like the way that would look, so

and determined that it was the way to go for maximum compactness and
efficiency.

But the efficiency differences really are negligible these days, and
Lisp / Scheme are much more popular than Forth. Incidentally, the RPL
stands for “Reverse Polish Lisp”.

Very interesting Ed. Thanks for the contribution. ~t

–

Tom C., MS MA, LMHC - Private practice Psychotherapist
Bellingham, Washington, U.S.A: (360) 920-1226
<< [email protected] >> (email)
<< TomCloyd.com >> (website)
<< sleightmind.wordpress.com >> (mental health weblog)
53

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:54:58 +0000, William J. wrote:

-greg

He’s harmless. CL (Commode Lord) is so bloated and hideous that only a
religious zealot would use it.

(Yeah but (He) (uses (strange syntax)))
((he) (just might convince (some newbie) (to program Ruby) (as though
((it) (were (LISP)))))

–Ken

54

Gregory B. [email protected] writes:

languages with an eye towards simplification. The language itself
evaluated from left to right. Operator precedence is explicity applied
Well if you need to talk about no conceptual advantage and just
different unintuitive syntax, you can say the same of Ruby vs. Lisp.

Why are you subscribed to ruby-talk if you hate Ruby so much? Is
someone forcing you to use it? And if so, how is that our problem.

If you were using CL (if more people were using CL), and Ruby were not
invented, more bosses would let us use CL as a dynamic language, and
indeed we wouldn’t be forced to use Ruby (or worse, perl or python).

Of course, you share the culpability with perl, PHP, Python, Java and
so on.

But I’m mostly justified in thinking this, by the authors of most of
these languages themselves. Some of these authors are just poor chaps
not knowing better, but some other including Java and Ruby knew very
well Lisp, and instead of choosing to help develop and spread lisp,
they voluntarily chosed to create different and inferior languages,
picking only parts of lisp, and grafting over their abortive creation
some monstruous syntax.

The fact that these monstruous syntaxes view good in the eyes of the
unwashed masses, and that the lack of features (when it’s not just the
inclusion of misfeatures) is oblivious to the same masses IS NOT an
excuse.

The only result is that Lisp is relegated as just an elegant weapon
from a more civilized time, still mastered only by a few remaining
Jedi.

But there is still hope!

This is perhaps the good that will come from these evils. A lot of
programmers are now exposed on the goodness of dynamic languages, and
they may notice (or if not by themselves, I will try to make them
notice in threads like this), that their fad language of the day, is
actually some incomplete subset of Lisp, and then why not use the full
and authentic thing? Common Lisp is this way!

PS: I’m not subscribed to “Ruby-Talk”, there’s a gateway between this
mail-list and news:comp.lang.ruby.

55

On Feb 24, 2:02 am, “M. Edward (Ed) Borasky” [email protected] wrote:

That dates back to Pascal.

Actually it dates back to Algol. The people who designed it did it for
a reason, but I can’t remember what it was. I think it was to remind
people that assignment was not equality, and the purists pronounce

a := b

as “a becomes b”.

If I ever design my own programming language, I’m going to use := for
assignment and == for equality, and let a single = be a syntax error,
just to avoid the whole confusion.

56

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 04:05:18PM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Having learned Lisp as Lisp 1.5, I’m much more inclined to Scheme than
Common Lisp, because Scheme fixed a lot of the warts on Lisp 1.5.

I’ve never really gotten past the initial playing-around stage with
either of them, but from my very scant experience, and from what I
know
of the two languages indirectly, I’m more inclined toward Scheme as
well.

I still don’t think the previous comments were very productive, though,
and they really didn’t need to be said in that context.

57

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:44 PM, karlvonl [email protected]
wrote:

If I ever design my own programming language, I’m going to use := for
assignment and == for equality, and let a single = be a syntax error,
just to avoid the whole confusion.

Not a bad idea.

-greg

58

On [Wed, 25.02.2009 01:14], Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:

This is perhaps the good that will come from these evils. A lot of
programmers are now exposed on the goodness of dynamic languages, and
they may notice (or if not by themselves, I will try to make them
notice in threads like this), that their fad language of the day, is
actually some incomplete subset of Lisp, and then why not use the full
and authentic thing? Common Lisp is this way!

In all honesty, but this seriously sounds pretty much like a speech of
a religious fanatic. “We are superior, let us enlighten you”.

And just as a hint: by pissing off about everybody on a list, news
group or whatever you are hardly going to achieve your aim.
You aren’t showing how “cool” Lisp is, but how narrow minded,
oldfashioned and ignorant Lisp users seem to be. (I know that I am not
allowed to generalize it, and I already apologize to sane Lisp users,
but you in particular are just a bad example, not achieving
anything).

We haven’t chosen Ruby for no reason, most of us have used other
languages as well, for quite some time, that is, and it is our
decission whether we use Ruby, Lisp or BASIC…

Use your CL, be happy, but for god’s sake, don’t be an zealot…

59

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 01:14:20AM +0900, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:

If you were using CL (if more people were using CL), and Ruby were not
invented, more bosses would let us use CL as a dynamic language, and
indeed we wouldn’t be forced to use Ruby (or worse, perl or python).

Of course, you share the culpability with perl, PHP, Python, Java and
so on.

[snip a bunch more of the same offensive nonsense]

You’re just acting like a troll, now. Please stop.

60

Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:

Gregory B. [email protected] writes:

…

Why are you subscribed to ruby-talk if you hate Ruby so much? Is
someone forcing you to use it? And if so, how is that our problem.

If you were using CL (if more people were using CL), and Ruby were not
invented, more bosses would let us use CL as a dynamic language, and
indeed we wouldn’t be forced to use Ruby (or worse, perl or python).

What perfidy! Won’t someone loosen your chains?

I bet your boss won’t let you throw in lots of parentheses in your
Perl code, too.

Of course, you share the culpability with perl, PHP, Python, Java and
so on.

Oh, the humanity!

But I’m mostly justified in thinking this, by the authors of most of
these languages themselves. Some of these authors are just poor chaps
not knowing better, but some other including Java and Ruby knew very
well Lisp, and instead of choosing to help develop and spread lisp,
they voluntarily chosed to create different and inferior languages,
picking only parts of lisp, and grafting over their abortive creation
some monstruous syntax.

I know what you mean. I can’t understand why people choose to use
such inferior and wimpy regular expression engines when they could
be experiencing the full power of snobol4 pattern matching.

The fact that these monstruous syntaxes view good in the eyes of the
unwashed masses, and that the lack of features (when it’s not just the
inclusion of misfeatures) is oblivious to the same masses IS NOT an
excuse.

Yes, it’s all bread and circuses to us. The world’s morals have
truly been weakened by a language that deigns to make users happy!

The only result is that Lisp is relegated as just an elegant weapon
from a more civilized time, still mastered only by a few remaining
Jedi.

And you consider yourself one such Jedi? I wonder. I sense much
fear in you, young one.

Every once in a while you should raise the blast shield and look
around. Even a Jedi will use a Perl blaster when he needs to.

But there is still hope!

So you’re the one prophesied to bring balance to the Language Force.
Great!

This is perhaps the good that will come from these evils. A lot of
programmers are now exposed on the goodness of dynamic languages, and
they may notice (or if not by themselves, I will try to make them
notice in threads like this), that their fad language of the day, is
actually some incomplete subset of Lisp, and then why not use the full
and authentic thing? Common Lisp is this way!

Impressive, young Skyparenthesizer. And here I thought Darth Java
had won the Clone/Dup/Bloat War.

You will try to make us notice? There is no ‘try’. You will find
that leads only to the Dark Side.

Isn’t there a better way? Maybe you can do for CL what others have
done for Java and .Net? Were you to do that, you’d have more fans
than parentheses.