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Re: SRFI 105: Curly-infix-expressions

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 105 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 105 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 12:23 PM, Shiro Kawai <shiro@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: "David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: SRFI 105: Curly-infix-expressions
> Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2012 20:45:28 -0400 (EDT)
>
>> Shiro Kawai:
>>> Probably because of my lack of experience of teaching Lisp family
>>> languages to non-Lispers, it is difficult for me to swallow the
>>> reasoning of "not having infix notations alienates people".
>>
>> People typically find familiar notations (or similar ones) easier to use.  It's not that one notation is more "natural" in a cosmic sense, it's familiarity.  But that MATTERS if someone  uses a notation a lot.
>>
>> The world has *standardized*, and has for hundreds of years, on infix notation for math, especially at the pre-college level.  That WILL NOT CHANGE.
>
> Don't take me wrong.  I'm not arguing that.
>
> In plain words, I'm questioning if you are trying to solve a
> right problem in this srfi.
>
> Surely infix op is a part of a solution, but disregarding other
> things that has made infix op actually work, the partial solution
> may not be as useful as we hope for, or even harmful.

Dunno.  But one major use of curly-infix in my own code is
with comparison operators like > < =

WAAY back in kindergarten my teachers taught me to view
> as a mouth.  The mouth wants to eat the bigger thing, so
it faces the bigger thing.  If it's >, the bigger thing is on the
left, while if it's <, the bigger thing is on the right.

That thing stuck with me since ('coz hey, look, I still remember
it! that was when I was like, 3? 4? 5? I'm 29 now.  And I
distinctly remember it as the kindergarten class).

Now, in infix that reasoning holds.  In prefix, > has its
back turned to the bigger thing, which kind makes it wrong.
< looks like it wants to eat everything (greedy mouth!)

> Same thing in operator precedence.  Surely, no precedence is
> simpler and we like simpler rules.  But what do we lose for not
> having precedence?

Note that we don't really lose precedence per se: there's a
hook for that (namely `nfx` and `transform-mixed-infix`).

We want to reserve the "{" and "}" symbols now for curly-infix,
and the community can vote with its feet (i.e. by using or
not using particular `nfx` implementations) on what precedence
system to use.

I (almkglor) personally feel that the issue of precedence is kinda
a bit large (come on, surely no one agrees that == binding tighter
than bit-level & in C is a good idea), and may require a far longer
process than SRFI provides.

Further, in math itself the actual precedence used IIRC is not much
more than <=> over */ over +-.  Some logic books consider
a ^ b v c ^ d and a ^ b ^ c as ill-formed in the absence of
explicit parenthesis for example.

Sincerely,
AmkG