🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <KERS.91May22091153@cdollin.hpl.hp.com> kers@hplb.hpl.hp.com
(Chris Dollin) writes:

>My God! Did they *seriously* propose to do partial parameterisation by simply
>*omitting* the remaining arguments to a call? No extra syntax - like a
>place-holder symbol - *at all*?

	Yup!  Just like the partial indexisation [:-)] that was in from
the beginning:  eg "vector := matrix [ , j]" to copy the "j"th column.
In fact, since parentheses are a permitted substitution for brackets in
implementations with restricted character sets, the *syntax* (in the
traditional sense) is already provided.

>The typechecker would spot some silly mistakes,

	Well, it's not that bad.  You have to work quite hard to create
a silly mistake that would compile [you can't usually interchange a
"procedure with parameter foo returning bar" and a "bar" without the
compiler complaining].  The only simple one I can think of is where
two adjacent parameters happen to have the same mode and empty and
provided parameters are swapped;  but that seems less likely to happen
than swapping two parameters anyway, which can be a pig to debug in
*any* programming language.

-- 
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk