Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?

Re:Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org? by thaumasiotes on Monday April 18, 2022 @06:42PM (#31077588)

> Grammar composition is hard.

Composing grammars may not be possible, but it's easy to define a new grammar that provides the composition of two other grammars along with boilerplate that serves the purpose of determining whether you're in a "grammar A" context or a "grammar B" context. You just need tokens that aren't valid in grammar A or grammar B.

No statement in such a grammar would be valid in either subgrammar, because of the boilerplate, but they would all be trivially reducible to valid statements in the appropriate subgrammar.

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Re:Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org? by PaulHoule on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @12:48PM (#31085599)

It drives people nuts but I say there are many characters in Unicode

https://unicode-table.com/en/sets/quotation-marks/

if you need a new kind of quote, so you could write

   Integer index = 77;
   Statement s = « SELECT COUNT(*) FROM that WHERE x = @index »;

People ask me "How do you type those on the keyboard?" and I say, "I don't type them on the keyboard, I cut and paste them." I use >128 codepoints all the time and mostly I don't need to because autocomplete works with them. No reason you can't write

   out.println(√(41.0))

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Re:Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org? by lproven on Thursday April 21, 2022 @06:25AM (#31107722)

I suggest learning to use the Compose key. For instance with no clipboard use at all, it enables «this».

Compose+<+< and then to close compose+>+>

Also see “curly” quotes: compose+<+" and compose+>+". This illustrates the power of composing: I had forgotten the shortcut, because I rarely use it, but I was able to guess it in 3 tries.

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