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Express What, not How.

Vis Mike visionary25 at _nospam_hotmail.com
Fri Oct 17 15:48:47 EDT 2003 
"Luke Gorrie" <luke at bluetail.com> wrote in message
news:lhad81igl6.fsf at dodo.bluetail.com...
> ketil+news at ii.uib.no writes:
>
> > Anonymous functions *can* be more clear than any name.  Either because
> > they are short and simple, because it is hard to come up with a good
> > name, and/or becuase they are ambigous.
> >
> > Say I want to attach an index to elements of a list.  I could write
> >
> >         integers = [1..]
> >         attach_index ls = zip integers ls
> >
> > or just
> >
> >         attach_index ls = zip [1..] ls
>
> If we're arguing to eliminate names that don't say very much, then
>
>   attach_index = zip [1..]

I think dynamic scoping within blocks really trims down on duplication and
make the code easier to read.  For example:

employees sort: [ | a b | a date < b date ]

A lot of typing for a simple concept:

employees sort: [ < data ]

I'm not against too much typing to be clear, but rather too much typping
that makes the concept unclear.

-- Mike

> > Whether you want to give an explicit name to the list of integers is
> > not given.  If the indexed list is local, it is better to use the
> > definition directly; I don't want to look up the definition of
> > integers (perhaps in a different module) to check whether it is [1..]
> > or [0..].
>
> And for the exact same reason you might like to just write "zip [1..]"
> instead of using a separate "attach_index" function.
>
> Cheers,
> Luke
>
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