Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format

Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by hood_syntax on Friday October 20, 2017 @11:13AM (#15516406)

Valid points about the ambiguity in that example, but I do believe 'none' is easier to parse than 'null' for the average person. I'm assuming that none is meant to represent, like null "no input was given" not "an input of zero/an empty list was given".

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Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by mh-cx on Friday October 20, 2017 @01:01PM (#15517316)

But in that case, wouldn't “unknown“ be even better? I'm not a native english speaker, though, so I may miss some fine nuances in the meaning of “none“.

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Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by hood_syntax on Friday October 20, 2017 @01:27PM (#15517548)

Disclaimer: this is just my personal views, so I may be missing something here.

'unknown' is almost like saying "We don't know what should be here", while 'none' is closer to saying "We didn't get passed any information here".

Ultimately, I feel like 'unknown' is more specific, it conveys intent beyond that of 'none'. Such as, it could imply we actually don't know what kind of data 'Opinions' should hold, rather than that there merely happens to be no data to put there.

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Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by greggirwin on Friday October 20, 2017 @02:09PM (#15517896)

We can throw out options for a long time, as there is no perfect choice. Ren went with `none` as it is standard Rebol and Rebol's designer thought about it long and hard.

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Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by jpfed on Friday October 20, 2017 @01:56PM (#15517798)

As a native English speaker, I agree that "unknown" is better than "none".

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Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by always_good on Friday October 20, 2017 @02:21PM (#15518004)

I would hope that a native English speaker knows the difference between

Cookies in the jar: none

and

Cookies in the jar: unknown

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Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by greggirwin on Friday October 20, 2017 @02:40PM (#15518162)

Unknown is a nice word for this, yes. And while we don't focus exclusively on being terse in the Redbol world, "unknown" is a lot more work to type than "none", harder to scan visually as well.

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Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by vorotato on Friday October 20, 2017 @11:52AM (#15516728)

also "Some | None" is a common functional programming idiom.

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Re:Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format by amyjess on Friday October 20, 2017 @11:59AM (#15516787)

It's worth mentioning that Python refers to null as None.

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