Re:What's Coming in Python 3.8
by earthboundkid on Thursday July 18, 2019 @10:11AM
(#20469935)
But surely Perl's $_ was way more influential than an obscure PG talk. I was reading PG way back in 2004, and I had never heard of anaphoric macros until now.
Wait, you think that, in the context of programming language design, a PyCon keynote is an obscure talk? I don't know what to say about that. It might be possible for you to be more wrong, but it would be very challenging.
Anyway, I'm talking specifically about the use of the identifier "it" in Kotlin, not implicitly or contextually defined identifiers in general, which are indeed a much more widespread concept, embracing Perl's $_ and @_, awk's $0 (and for that matter $1 and $fieldnumber and so on), Dyalog APL's α and ω, Smalltalk's "self", C++'s "this", dynamically-scoped variables in general, and for that matter de Bruijn numbering.
Re:What's Coming in Python 3.8
by earthboundkid on Thursday July 25, 2019 @08:59AM
(#20524956)
> a PyCon keynote is an obscure talk
Compared to the existence of Perl, yes. Anyone who does any amount of Perl learns that $_ is the implicit argument ("like 'it'") to most functions. It's pretty much one of Perl's main deals. The talk has about 100K views on YouTube, which is pretty good, but Perl is in another league.
(He'd also written about that more at length in the 1990s in On Lisp, but many more people became acquainted with his language-design ideas in the 2001–2003 period, thanks to Lightweight Languages and his increasingly popular series of essays.)