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@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +This file contains various notes about the Oryx language and language +design more generally that I have compiled over my time developing the +Oryx ecosystem. These are mostly just for myself to remember in the +future, as well as the potential interest of others. + +1. Unified logical- and bitwise operators is a potentially bad idea. + After a few attempts at unifying these seemingly similar operators + (‘|’ and ‘||’, ‘&’ and ‘&&’, etc.) I have concluded that it makes + little sense. + + The first argument is that when you see ‘a & b’ you assume that both + sides of the argument are being evaluated while you assume + short-circuiting in ‘a && b’. + + Another issue I came to realize is one that occurs when you consider + the fact that bitwise-NOT is merely the unary version of bitwise-XOR¹ + (similar to how you have both a unary- and binary-minus). This means + that a NOT and an XOR would look like ‘~a’ and ‘a ~ b’ respectively. + This is fine until you merge bitwise- and logical-NOT. All of a + sudden you get ambiguity when you see ‘a ~= b’. Is this a compound + assignment that expands to ‘a = a ~ b’, or is it a logical not-equals + operation between ‘a’ and ‘b’? + + ¹ This is an observation made by both Go and Odin. Odin does use ‘~’ + for both operations. Go on the otherhand retains ‘^’ for XOR and ‘~’ + for bitwise-negation, but it does have an AND-NOT operator + represented by ‘&^’, the operators for AND and… XOR. Likewise + LLVM IR does not even include an operator to perform a bitwise + negation, instead requiring the user to express it as the XOR of your + to-be-negated oprand and 1. + +2. Prefixless functions à la Jai are not a good idea. Take the simple + example of ‘f :: (a: int) (int, int)’. What is ‘f’? It seem to be a + function that takes an integer and returns two integers, but this + could actually also be a function that takes an integer and returns a + new function that accepts 2 integers and returns nothing. With a + function prefix this ambiguity is solved: + + f :: func (a: int) (int, int); + f :: func (a: int) func (int, int); + + Additionally this allows for consistent syntax between functions and + macros: + + addf :: func (a, b: int) int { return a + b; } + addm :: macro (a, b: int) int { return a + b; } |