Arc's out!

Jan 30, 2008 11:04

http://arclanguage.org/Read more... )

lisp, computers, programming, arc

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Comments 15

necaris January 30 2008, 12:46:02 UTC
indexes into data structures are indistinguishable from function calls
Ooh! That sounds interesting! Possibly really confusing though?

From the website: Arc is designed above all for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it
My favorite kind :-) Perhaps I should venture in there too...

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pozorvlak January 30 2008, 12:48:13 UTC
Yeah :-) From a brief flick through, it seems to combine most of the good features of Common Lisp with the good features of Scheme. It's very much a work-in-progress, though - no Unicode support, for instance.

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totherme January 30 2008, 14:36:44 UTC
I'd be interested in your opinion of PLT-Scheme in this context. Are there any obvious reasons why one is better than the other? For scripting? For exploratory programming?

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totherme January 30 2008, 15:01:43 UTC
Of course, now that I'm looking more closely into actually trying out those two languages, I notice that one is actually built on top of the other...

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pozorvlak January 31 2008, 23:24:51 UTC
Yep :-)

There's been a lot of criticism of Arc, much of it saying "he hasn't done anything really new, all this stuff has been done in Lisp dialects before!" But I think it was probably a good idea to explicitly not be a Scheme, so Arc can grow in non-Schemey directions.

I dunno what PLT Scheme's like, but I hear good things about it :-) Arc looks cool, but it's very much a version 0 at the moment.

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totherme February 1 2008, 15:12:02 UTC
The challenge for me here (as someone whose only lisp experience is a smattering of the widely decried emacs-lisp), is figuring out which bits of arc are just lisp, and which bits are genuinely new.

So far as I can tell, at the moment, arc is just PLT scheme without so many libraries, with shorter names for several things, some syntactic sugar (the function composition operator for example) and some new looping constructs.

There's almost certainly more to it than that, but I'm having trouble finding it without learning PLT first. Given those first impressions, I'm thinking that maybe my time would actually be better spent learning PLT first...

Oh yes - and with strings as lists - I certainly approve of that.

I dunno - does anyone with more knowledge have an opinion on which is worth spending time on first?

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sable_veins January 30 2008, 15:20:36 UTC
My O my! Whenever I read these sorts of posts, I just don't understand a solitary thing! They do have some most terrific words in 'em, though!

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pozorvlak January 31 2008, 23:22:37 UTC
"Anaphoric", for one :-)

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totherme February 1 2008, 17:17:49 UTC
Incidentally, did you know about Q?

it was brought to my attention by this post on planet.haskell.

A quick google for "K2 Language" failed to find any clues about the other terse language mentioned.

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pozorvlak February 4 2008, 15:41:22 UTC
Pwnz0r3d :-)

I'd guess that K2 is version 2 of K, which is a semi-proprietary APL-descendent: here's a nice Kuro5hin article on it. I'm reminded of someone complaining about "Haskell's Eigerlike learning curve": hopefully K2 isn't a reference to the steepness of K's learning curve...

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pozorvlak February 4 2008, 21:47:52 UTC
That's actually quite a fun challenge - I was doodling Perl versions of the code on envelopes over dinner, and I'm going to try to write a version in Arc and blog about it. But what bugs me is this: why didn't he just use grep?

*furkles through man grep. Gives up on grep's broken regex syntax*

OK, why didn't he use perl -ne 's/--.*//; print "$_\n" foreach /\b\w*widget\b/gi' | sort | uniq?

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pozorvlak February 4 2008, 21:51:12 UTC
Or in pure Perl:

perl -e 'while (<>) { s/--.*//; $widgets{$_}++ foreach /\b\w*widget\b/gi } print join "\n", keys %widgets'

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