Re: [Bug-apl] Request to add to the ⎕fio[] a 'function_common_name' as argument

[Juergen Sauermann]

Hi Xtian,

thank you very much for your proposal. I am not too fond of the idea though.
Not because of the coding effort on my side, but because of other considerations.

Consider the following syntactical variants of the same thing, and my personal
judgements of their readability and portability:

              Syntax                           Readability       Portability
a.      Z←A ⎕FIO[3] B          worse         no
b.      Z←A ⎕FIO['fopen'] B    OK            no
c.      Z←A FIO∆fopen B        better        yes

then your proposal (which is obviously b. above) is IMHO better readable than a.,
but arguably worse than c. (which is )COPY 5 FILE_IO). But there are also some
downsides:

- is is an entirely redundant syntax, and
- it lacks portability

I believe it is generally a good thing to have a wrapper workspace like FILE_IO because it
makes workspaces using it portable to other interpreters (where, of course, somebody
has to implement the functions provided by FILE_IO). It was, for example, possible to change
the underlying implementation of FILE_IO from a native function to a system function ⎕FIO.
People using FILE_IO at that time would (at least conceptually) not notice any difference
when that change was made, while people not using FILE_IO will need to change their
workspaces all over the place when the native variant will finally disappear.

And my experiences with redundant syntax constructs in GNU APL are also rather negative.
Looking backwards I would judge my decision to accept lambdas in GNU APL (which was, BTW,
also proposed by a GNU APL user at that time) as my worst decision in the GNU APL project so far.
 
Best Regards,
/// Jürgen Sauermann

On 01/04/2017 07:16 AM, Christian Robert wrote:

I would love to be able to do:

fd ←⎕fio['open'] '.bashrc'
⎕fio['fclose'] fd

and so on ...

I have a Workspace named "fio" who just do that, but I would love if gnu-apl could just understand 'open'/'close'/... rather than just random numbers, as actually.

Numbers are fine, but a tagged name as in ⎕fio['bind'] would be a *plus*. (no need for us to remember the random numbers, only the function name)

Yes, a couple of hours for Juergen to code it, but so much reliefs/and/easier on our side, as end user.

my wishes for 2017 ;-)

Xtian.