> once you have named parameters, you don't need the parens.
Can you share an example of what this would look like in practice? I'm having trouble thinking of how this syntax would work.
Can you share an example of what this would look like in practice? I'm having trouble thinking of how this syntax would work.
var a, b, c;
...
a = b.fooBar(1, 2);
c = a.fooBarBaz(1, 2, a);
|a b c|
...
a := b foo:1 bar:2.
c := a foo:1 bar:2 baz:a.
...
The Smalltalk syntax is hard for me to parse, but it's probably just a familiarity thing. I remember when I first learned Swift I wasn't fond of not ending lines with semicolons. Now I dislike having to type them in languages where they're required.
1 to: 20 do:[ :i | Transcript show:i. ]
1 to: 20 do:{ stdout println:$0. }
While binary and unary messages chain w/o problems, it's not possible to disentangle two keyword messages:
receiver msg1:arg1 msg2:arg1
receiver msg1:arg1 msg1:arg2
But not always, it turns out. If you actually chain messages to the same receiver, you can use the semicolon to chain those messages:
myRect x:20;
y:10;
width:100;
height:100.
In Objective-S[1], you can use the pipe ("|") to chain message-sends that go to the result of the previous message, rather than its receiver. For example:
self dictionariesForQuery: "select {column} from {table}" | collect | at:column.
> delineating the argument set for a single function is the main job parens fulfill.
Right. Which is one of the many reasons why the case of Swift is so mind-boggling: there some of the parameters go inside the parens, some outside. I think you can make a good case for either all in or all out (better for all-out, IMHO, but whatever). But partly in and partly out?