hasenj on What's happening with Arc?

Comment on What's happening with Arc?parent

I despite long names in JavaLibrariesAndFrameWorks but I don't appreciate tla aop (three letter acronyms all over the place).

Your second code snippet is actually much more pleasant to read.

evanrmurphy 15y

Sure, it's subjective. :)

I forgot to mention though that the idea is to use the shortest names possible for the core language operators. That's when they're the biggest win, since you'll learn those well enough not to need descriptive names, and they cut program length more substantially since they're used so often.

hasenj 15y

Right, and I agree with that. I prefer = over define.

The problem comes when everything is "inlined".

    (def color (r g b)
      (with (c (table) 
             f (fn (x) (if (< x 0) 0 (> x 255) 255 x)))
        (= (c 'r) (f r) (c 'g) (f g) (c 'b) (f b))
        c))

This is the first thing in html.arc

I can't make sense of it, it's way too terse.

This is probably why python doesn't have a proper lambda expression.

EDIT:

After some pondering, I see what it does ..

An equally terse implementation in python:

  def limit(n, lower, upper):
      if n < lower: return lower
      if n > upper: return upper
      return n

  def color(*args):
      return dict(zip("rgb", [limit(c, 0, 255) for c in args]))

  >>> color(10, 20, 30)
  {'r': 10, 'b': 30, 'g': 20}

This is a lot clearer, without sacrificing conciseness:

  def color(*args):
      rgb_values = [limit(c, 0, 255) for c in args]
      return dict(zip("rgb", rgb_values))

By simply getting the inlined list comprehension outside the dict expression, the whole thing becomes 10 times easier to read: "Ah, it's mapping 'rgb' characters to rgb values."

Comments