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Re:Types for Tables: A Language Design Benchmark by chrisaycock on Saturday December 11, 2021 @08:10PM (#29526069)
F# is how I learned about type providers:

http://fsprojects.github.io/FSharp.Data/library/CsvProvider....

But look at that syntax:

  CsvProvider<"file.csv">.Load("file.csv")
The file name is listed twice! Conceivably a macro could hide that, but we'd still have the issue that the string has to be written fully. I.e., I can't just call a function to generate the string.

F# has Literals that mitigate some of this, but my understanding is that they are pretty limited:

https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions/issues/539

On the other hand, Empirical can perform automatic compile-time function evaluation on any legal expression, including across variables, user-defined functions, user-defined datatypes, etc.

  func filename(n):
    let value = String(n + 1)
    return "/path/to/" + value + ".csv"
  end

  load(filename(7))
I could put the filename in a Dataframe embedded in my source, then reference the row/column I want. Empirical's automatic CTFE handles it.
Re:Types for Tables: A Language Design Benchmark by chusk3 on Saturday December 11, 2021 @11:22PM (#29527122)
Nitpick here = the `Load` member takes a path to _any_ file of the same schema as the sample, but you can also just use the sample at runtime with the use of `Load()`. So it doesn't have to be as redundant as you've shown here, the flexibility is all about loading other instances of the same data shape.