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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

(Maybe Steve is around)

Why did Rust go with the IMHO ugly closure syntax of

    |stuff|

I think that

     stuff ->

is much nicer to look at... :(

Also, not presented here, but ‘ is also kind of ugly, was there no short keyword that could have been used? “life or “lt” for “lifetime”? “span”?

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That closure syntax has been around longer than Steve.

So I take it you would like to be able to declare your references as `&life of brian`?

Heh, who knows, maybe Python adds this feature for Python 4 :p

As my sibling says, it was there before me. Ruby and smalltalk also use this syntax, so it’s not without precedence.

As for lifetimes, that syntax is from OCaml, though they use it for something else. “life” and “lt” seem too short, “span” is overloaded. We tried to explore options but none were clearly better, so we kept what we had.

> As for lifetimes, that syntax is from OCaml, though they use it for something else.

I hadn't noticed the similarity but it makes sense. This is the OCaml syntax for generics, eg:

    type 'a list_with_generic = 'a list;

Yeah, it's also not as different as it sounds, as lifetimes are fundamentally generics, just of a different kind than types.

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