zlacker

[return to "Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator"]
1. vegash+0i[view] [source] 2007-02-28 06:43:38
>>pg+(OP)
Better display of source code in comments
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2. pg+Dq8[view] [source] 2007-07-06 14:54:00
>>vegash+0i
You can now include code in comments:

 (def codetree (file)
   (trav + 1 (readall (infile file))))
Anything that appears after two newlines and a blank space is treated as code, till there's a line that doesn't begin with a space. This is like the markdown convention, but you don't have to use four spaces; one will do.

Incidentally, the code above tells me the number of nodes in the code tree of a file. Not just leaves, which would be

 (len (flat (readall (infile file))))
but interior nodes as well. To me this is the best measure of how long a program is. I used to go by lines of code

 (def codelines (file)
   (w/infile in file 
     (summing test
       (whilet line (readline in)
         (test (aand (find nonwhite line) (isnt it #\;)))))))
but I found this was encouraging me to do the wrong things.

(This kind of test matters because I'm constantly trying to make news.yc shorter as a way of pushing functionality down into Arc.)

Here's trav, btw:

 (def trav (f base tree)
   (if (atom tree)
       (base tree)
       (f (trav f base (car tree)) (trav f base (cdr tree)))))
It traverses a tree, doing something at every node. So e.g. CL copy-tree would be

 (def copy-tree (tree) (trav cons (fn (x) x) tree))
If you're wondering how the second argument to trav in codetree could be 1, it's because a constant when called as a function simply returns itself. This turns out to be quite handy.

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3. hennin+9r8[view] [source] 2007-07-06 17:05:26
>>pg+Dq8
Is Arc going to support concurrency and/or manycore systems?

The original writing(s) on Arc assumed a free lunch that would continue for decades (justifying a lack of emphasis on scalability and efficiency in implementation, I thought), which already seems kind of naive. You can already buy 8-core systems from Apple, mang. It's the future.

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4. jsmcgd+xr8[view] [source] 2007-07-06 19:07:24
>>hennin+9r8
Making a dialect that is the de facto for multi-core programming could be quite a ruse.
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