[nem-en] Increment and decrement operators

[d]

On Feb 26, 2006, at 12:01 PM, Philippe Quesnel wrote:

> On 2/26/06, Kamil Skalski < kamil.skalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> To make it clear: I'm thinking about adding new operators '+++' and
> '---', which would return values.

  IMO a bad idea. Not when writing code, but when reading somebody  
else's.
Confusing, not very intuitive blablabla..

> On the other hand, having ++ behave as expected by many would be very
> nice - maybe we should have a special case for ++ and -- so that they
> will return void in general, but if expected some value, they will
> return it...

  Now that's an interesting concept :-d Really. Actually I'd say  
that's a nice
philosophy overall. Making some syntactic constructs mean what the
programmer *wants* them to mean, guessing from context (perhaps
combined with compiler hints in some cases).
  That would apply to ++ vs +++, [] vs .[], [foo | bar] vs $[foo |  
bar] and probably
many more.
  I still like SML the most out of all languages for situations where  
I don't need
extensive libraries mainly because it's very small and concise, with  
very few
things to remember. Hardly any other language allows to write code  
that's
totally clean/clear and understandable *AND* as (or even more) concise,
as the specifications for the algorithms being implemented. THAT'S  
what I
call a *good* language.
  Obviously achieving that in Nemerle is not as simple for many  
reasons (the
OO/imperative/functional mix + C#/.NET compatibility demand more  
syntactic
constructs), but that doesn't mean the idea of keeping it small and  
clean
should be abandoned.  Applying this "intelligent guessing" philosophy  
would
be a big step in the right direction IMO.
  Of course it would take an additional effort on the side of ncc  
developers, but
I think now is the time to do it (if ever), since 1.0 is nearing and  
major changes
after that are not planned AFAIR..

d