[PD-dev] pd-extended loadlib request

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Sun Jan 27 18:43:00 CET 2008


On Fri, 25 Jan 2008, Chris McCormick wrote:

> Perl has so many redundant language constructs for doing the same thing
> multiple ways that it's not even worth mentioning them all (And that is
> considered by Perl programmers as a major feature of the language).

Onr reason thay it might not worth mentioning here is that the topic is 
plain aliases: two names for exactly the same thing. In Perl you have 
considerable overlap of the base constructs, but nothing that completely 
coïncides. Furthermore it's difficult to decide whether that should be 
compared, because pd is a language in which the equivalents of most base 
constructs of Perl are fitting in the pattern of classes and objects: in 
terms of syntax, Perl and Ruby are large languages, whereas Pd is a very 
small language, just like Forth, Scheme, Tcl. (Ruby is syntactically large 
even though many more things are fitting in the class/object pattern than 
in most other languages... it's that Perl influence).

> Many languages have a shortened form of if statement that is effectively
> a low-syntax alias for the regular if statement.

Many also have && and ||, which are also kinds of "if"s, but it's most 
flexible in Perl/Ruby, in which those two operators have arbitrary return 
values instead of just bool, so they can more often be used in practice 
than in other languages. They have aliases called "and" and "or" which are 
not plain aliases because they also have different operator precedence. 
Both languages have a bunch of if-constructs like that but they all cover 
different syntactic combinations so e.g.

   b if a

is not completely equivalent to:

   if a then b end

because it's a different order, but then it depends what you want to 
figure out about redundancy. Maybe we want to categorise language 
redundancy in a way like this:

   1. totally the same use, different name

   2. different syntax, different order of arguments, etc.

   3. less obvious equivalences (a combination of two constructs is
      equivalent to another construct or to a combination of two other
      constructs)

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada


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