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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but optional parenthesis is a no go for me.

Every time I try to read a Ruby line with no (), I have to stop and think.

Not being able to scan code is an anti feature.

Rye as Rebol (that it derives from) doesn't use parenthesis in general. In Rebol you can use them optionally for explicitly defining evaluation priority. But not in the same form as in Algol based languages:

    print(inc(x))

But like Lisps. I've used them when I wanted to be very certain about evaluation, but not in general.

    (print(inc x))

In Rebol (or Rye) this is usually just:

    print inc x

That's why all function in Rebol/Rye have fixed arity and yes, you generally have to know it or deduce it from the code, which is a minus.

Rye currently doesn't have parenthesis option, but it might get it at the end. It does have op and pipe words, an optional left to right flow, which can also better hint about the structure than pure polish notation of Rebol I think. For better of worse, these Rye expressions all do the same :) --

    print inc x
    print x .inc
    x .inc .print
    inc x |print

Ha, I'm the opposite. Every time I'm writing python I have to stop and think "is it response.json or response.json()?" And then I think about how Ruby (I think nicely) solved the attribute/method decision problem.

Attribute access and method access don't imply the same consequences on perfs and side effects, I like to know which is which.

Ideally this would be a view setting, and could be enabled or disabled for different users without making edits to the code.

Yes, and IDE that would know the arity of functions (which is not totally simple, because of the very dynamic nature of the language) would be able to display the "parenthesis" or the grouping of function calls. I plan to make sort of visual editor for it too as an experiment so that could be a first demo of it.

I hope we see this kind of exploration with Unison, which is stored as an AST in a database and not as text.

Of course you could just take existing text from a codebase and reformat it for viewing, but then there's this ambiguity about which version is real that you'd have to deal with.

In Unison it's understood that none of the text is real, it's only the resulting AST and its hash that matters, so if you're seeing text at all you know it's just for your benefit in that moment. It's such a cool idea.

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