Re:Nimrod: A New Approach to Metaprogramming [video]
by rbehrends on Thursday January 16, 2014 @05:29PM
(#7072955)
1) Conversely, while Ada used to not allow in out parameters for functions, it is allowed as of Ada 2012 [1]. There's certainly an argument to be made either way. For what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of functions with side effects myself.
3) You can't optimize it away. A compile-time conditional statement has to allow for undefined identifiers and such, but for a runtime conditional statement you want to have the compiler signal an error even if it can statically determine that the condition is always true or false.
[1] http://www.ada-auth.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/ai05s/ai05-0143-1...
If I were starting a new language, I wouldn't pass the opportunity of disallowing mixing these concepts, so there's a way to reason about pure functions.
3) I get that, but it feels like something that could've been optimized away by the compiler, they didn't bothered and instead bloated the syntax. Not a fan of the naming too.
4) Just IMHO, but this kind of magic feels out of place on a static language. In something like Python, variable arguments aren't as opaque since there's an underlying object being passed around (a list or a dict), and your arguments can be of any type.