Do you see some significance of the hash sign in respect to maps?
You could say that &[ ... ] relates to the key & value pairs.
Gregg
It's funny. I was just thinking about this exact issue and that we do need *something* but I haven't come up with anything better that is short (just a symbol) and meaninful. A colon/double colon or =/== makes sense in that keys end in colons or mean, roughly "equals", and kind of like production rules in grammars, but are syntactically much further from REBOL.
DocKimbel
#{...} could be a possible literal form for construction syntax.
Andreas
> Do you see some significance of the hash sign in respect to maps?
Yes, but not a strong one. A map is a "hash table", hence the hash.
However, the primary reason I really like the hash sign #[...] notation is that it visually stands out. I experimented with :[...] ("colon block") for a while, but that's just too muted, too easily overlooked.
Andreas
#{...} for construction syntax would certainly be a possibility. But then we'd have to find another syntax for binary!.
Maybe #(...) for construction syntax makes sense? (And #(...) is unused, at the moment.) In a way, construction syntax can be understood to be something "forced", something immediate which somewhat matches the use of paren (....) in other contexts.
Henrik
what happens to serialized values, like #[none] ?
Gregg
It's still there Henrik.
:[] doesn't stand out much Andreas, I agree.
Gregg
I should say that REBOL's construction syntax is still in REBOL. Ren doesn't know anything about it. At least according to the current spec.
DocKimbel
Right, #(...) is what I meant. :-)
Andreas
> what happens to serialized values, like #[none] ?
Those things are called "construction syntax" now. An alternative syntax for construction syntax, under the premise that #[...] would be nice for maps, is what we are discussing right now.
Henrik
OK, thanks
Andreas
Sorry, that maybe sounded a bit gruff -- not intended. Any thoughts would be more than welcome :)
Oldes
There is always the big "back compatibility"question. Mentioned #[none] and similar may be used in many plain text data files, but I guess it's still not late for R3 and Red to change it to #(none) and use #[ ] for maps.
(I can say this as I have not ported any of my R2 scripts to R3 yet!)
DocKimbel
Why wouldn't we use #(...) for maps rather?
Oldes
It does not looks fine to me... btw, why to have special construct for map! anyway? one can always use:
>> #[map![a 2 b 3]] == make map! [ a 2 b 3 ]
Which leads to question if this would be considered as nice:
#(#[a 1 b 2])
and...
>> #[map![a 2 b 3] is it ok that I can do this?] == make map! [ a 2 b 3 ]
#[#(a 1 b 2)]
DocKimbel
"why to have special construct for map! anyway?" To be able for REN to compete with JSON.
#(...) is probably ok for construction syntax, leaving #[...] for maps.