Too terse and too alien?

[Neal Gafter]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 11:02 PM, Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com> wrote:
> > I think single-expression closures will be the most common form,
> especially
> > in the context of the kinds of aggregate (possibly concurrent) operations
> > that is cited as the primary motivation for adding closures at this time.
>
> Are those aggregate operations expected to be usually limited to
> simple math, assignments, ternary ifs and method calls with no
> try-catch, switch, loops?


In my experience, yes, virtually always.


> I also think other
> important use cases for closures are the java.util.concurrent API, to
> execute whole blocks of code asynchronously, and event handlers, and
> both usually consist of much more than a single expression.
>

Right.  Those other contexts are ones in which transparency is more
important, and yielding a result value is rare.

> An extra return does make a difference, particularly if we ever hope to
> more
>
 > fully support transparency ala BGGA in a future extension.
>
Well, AFAIK return is mandatory for multiple-statement closures, with
>
the semantics of returning a value from the closure, so this already
> makes them incompatible with the BGGA proposed behaviour (which I
> don't like btw, but that doesn't count).
>

Yes, that is the current state of the proposal, which is why it's valuable
to address it now.