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Mutating vs non-mutating words
Factor has many words that do almost the same thing but have different stack effects, such as remove-nth ( n seq -- seq' )
and delete-nth ( n -- seq )
. This results in having to remember two different names for every concept. One proposed solution is to use Scheme's naming convention for mutation, which is a ! at the end of the word. Then we'd have delete-nth
for creating new sequences and delete-nth!
for mutating existing ones. What would the stack effects be on these new versions?
One issue is that ! is already used for comments. One proposed idea is to change the comment character to #. The # symbol is a word in the make
vocabulary, but this could be changed. Ideas?
An alternative approach is to move towards using Persistent data structures for hashtables and vectors and making just a single word do both mutation and non-mutation, with the stack effect being word ( ... old-obj ... -- new-obj )
. Maybe you would still need two names. Anyone?
Should integers be sequences?
Should associative lists be first-class tuples or remain as 2arrays?
Erlang-style concurrency or 1:1 native threading?
This revision created on Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:10:25 by erg