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3 points by almkglor 6088 days ago | link | parent

Looks like you have to add something like:

  /  (msg L 'r)
capital L means left-associative, so foo/bar/nitz is grouped {{foo / bar} / nitz}.

As an aside, why not <- ? Basically parent<-owner<-id means "send 'id to the result of sending 'owner to parent".

For that matter if an object, such as parent above, is something of very specific type, you can even use the Anarki 'defcall syntax. For example if messageable objects are of type 'messageable, you can do:

  (defcall messageable (o m)
    (msg o m))
which creates the relation:

  (foo bar) == (msg foo bar), if (is (type foo) 'messageable)
Then (msg parent 'owner) is simply parent!owner. If you load the new Anarki ssyntaxes.arc, then parent!owner!id is ((parent 'owner) 'id)


1 point by dreish 6086 days ago | link

Thanks for the tips.

I considered <- (along with a lot of other things), but rejected it because the left-associativity of it seemed counter-intuitive, it didn't stand out as much as slashes, and I want it to stand out because it's inconsistent with symbol syntax, it's confusing with -> which conventionally means type-conversion (and which doesn't break up symbols), and it's three times as much effort to type as /.

Slashes are fairly common in symbols, but not at the beginning (except for / itself), so it's unambiguously parseable, though maybe it won't work with this system, now that I think about it. I don't see how to prevent embedded slashes from meaning anything special without the first slash. I.e., I want foo/bar/nitz to be one symbol, but /foo/bar/nitz to be a symbol and two msg calls. Maybe that's too hairy, but I'd hate to break things like w/uniq.

I guess the general solution to any syntax that is confusing to people is a good syntax-highlighting editor.

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3 points by almkglor 6086 days ago | link

Well, for that matter having (foo msg) mean "send msg to foo" would be much shorter, and also shows that Scheme was originally a synchronous message-passing language anyway.

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1 point by dreish 6086 days ago | link

Yeesh, why didn't I think of that?

That seems clearly to be the best way to do it. Thanks again.

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