this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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Huh, the parenthesization thing is interesting. Programming languages so often pretend to be maths, because in specific situations, people do a lot of maths with them, and you get a familiarity bonus for it.
But yeah, it's often clunky. I know in Rust, it's a real problem that they can't distinguish whether you're using
<
to compare the size of two numbers or to specify generics, which is why the turbofish-syntax exists.And yeah, it just rarely feels actually worth it, as you could just as well write
3.less_than(5)
.This parenthesization thing is definitely another such case, which I hadn't considered yet.
I imagine, for most languages, it isn't too big of a deal to have a special casing for that, as it mostly only overlaps with tuple-syntax, but for languages with implicit returns out of
{ }
, it's kind of an unnecessary oddity in the syntax.