Re: A few things I would like to see in a new programming language.

--- In [email protected], "digulla2000" <digulla@h...> wrote:
> But inside of a function (ie. a small block of program that does a  
> simple operation), things should be sequential because that's  
> easier to understand.   

No, that's what's easier for *you* to understand.  What makes
Haskell's 'where' clause different from simply defining one-line
methods is that it essentially allows you to define mini-functions
which: a) are confined to the namespace of the enclosing function
(which is good, because these one-liners tend to have short, common
names); b) have *very* little syntactic overhead; and c) have access
to the enclosing function's scope so that nothing has to be passed in.

The requirement that I, personally, would draw out of this
conversation is that a) Pragmatic ought to allow, but not require,
'where' clause type constructs; and b) Pragmatic should have an
abstract enough model to allow 'where' clauses to be transformed
automatically into sequential code for the benefit of programmers who
think better sequentially.

> This might mean that the code can't be expressed in ASCII anymore.   
> Maybe the compiler should already contain editors for more complex  
> data structures and plug-in optimizers.

God no.  If there's one thing guaranteed to kill off your language
it's the inability to easily edit any and all code in vi, emacs, or
notepad if necessary.

~Avdi


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