Re:Linguistics and Programming Languages
by slaymaker1907 on Monday July 17, 2017 @07:19PM
(#14793114)
There are already constructs like this. In all programming languages, you see variable names like data or result all over the place. Additionally, when using the python interpreter, there is a special variable _ for the last expression evaluated.
"it" is common in that sense, but muse additionally models "the" as a function that turns verbs into nouns - like we do. For example,
(open-file "blah" 'for-writing)
(write (the open-file) "hello world")
(close it)
(length (list "milk" "pudding"))
(print "number of items is " (the length))Either Kotlin or eXtend already have "it" for the default variable name of single-parameter lambdas.
Way back, I'd designed a scheme-based scripting language called "muSE" [1] in which we created specifications for video editing styles. I also toyed with the language. One such experiment was having a way to refer to values already computed using "the" and "it". [2]
[1] https://github.com/srikumarks/muSE [2] https://github.com/srikumarks/muSE/wiki/TheAndIt
edit: This project isn't maintained, but the latest version 711 still works on macosx [3]
[3] https://code.google.com/archive/p/muvee-symbolic-expressions...