The prefix symbol

[Yuval Shavit]

Not a huge deal, but for those of us with not-very-big hands, # is easier to
type than ^.

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Pavel Minaev <int19h at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would prefer to see "^" instead:
>
>  ^x -> x + 1
>
>  ^(x) { return x + 1; }
>
>  ^{ x -> x + 1 }
>
> The main reason is actually purely subjective preference for the look: I
> feel that it is less visually noisy than "#", where the latter gives undue
> weight to the start marker of the lambda, and not to the important parts of
> it (i.e. argument list and body). At the same time, "^" sits rather above
> the baseline of the text, making it easy to distinguish when you are
> actually scanning for the beginning of the lambda.
>
> The secondary reason is that "^" remotely resembles the lambda character,
> so
> it is somewhat mnemonic.
>
> To the best of my knowledge, there are no parse problems here - while "^"
> is
> an existing binary operator, there are no contexts in which it could be
> confused for the above syntax.
>
> A potential disadvantage is that "^" already means xor, and is being reused
> here for a completely unrelated thing. But I think that xor is very
> infrequent in typical Java code, and so there is little potential for
> confusion here.
>
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Stephen Colebourne
> <scolebourne at joda.org>wrote:
>
> > The four syntax families split into two types, those with a prefix
> > symbol and those without.
> >
> > The prefix symbol is commonly mentioned as #:
> >
> > #(x) { return x + 1; }
> > #{x -> x + 1}
> >
> >
> > *** If you have a strong desire to see any symbol other than #
> > considered then please respond to this thread. ***
> >
> > - Your reply MUST specify the symbol
> > - Your reply MUST give a brief justification
> > - Your reply MUST repeat the two examples above using your preferred
> symbol
> > - You SHOULD try to ensure that your alternate symbol choice would
> > parse acceptably
> > - You MAY reply to suggest a keyword, however you should expect that
> > to be rejected
> >
> > Thread rules:
> > - Only reply if you prefer your alternate symbol to #
> > - To discuss something, change the thread title
> > - Don't reply just to say "I don't want a prefix symbol"
> > - Responding with a symbol suggestion doesn't preclude your first
> > choice actually being "no prefix symbol"
> >
> > For example, my preferred choice of prefix symbol is #, thus I should
> > not respond to this thread!
> >
> > Stephen
> > (this is an experiment to see if we can focus on one particular
> > discussion element at a time)
> >
> >
>
>