Hacking Elixir's Syntax

blog.heldscal.la

112 points·rogerbraun··6 comments

This blog touches on why Elixir is doing so well-- it's easy to extend and add to the language, pull requests are welcome and (most of the time, anyway) the Jose appreciates and integrates additions to the language. (He once rejected something that I disagree with, but on the balance he's doing a righteous job.)

In fact, it's the only language I've contributed to. In large part because the bar is so low and the process is so reasonable.

What a beautiful solution. Glad to see how simple things like this can be done!

lovely, I had a similar experience pushing a PR rewriting the tokenizer to include column info

Why not just write it in hexadecimal?

Some things like are better done in binary, it's very common some languages like VHDL and Verilog.

Sometimes you are dealing with fields that are packed into a 32-bit (or 8- or 16- or 64-bit) word where one field is bits 0 through 5 and another field is bits 6 through 9 and a status bit in bit 10 and another field is bits 11 through 31. Thinking about those in hex is much harder than if they were all nice multiples of 4 bits in size. Yes, C programmers have been dealing with this for decades (no binary literals in C), but wouldn't it be nice to write each of those fields in binary (with underscores separating them) and let the machine do the rest?

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