A proliferation of $#@^':~WORD~:s

[bradrn]

Starting with what I feel is most important:

@hostilefork

But the choice to limit to one sigil is intentional, as an attempt to focus thinking along the particular strata of parts when solving problems.

The question I’m asking here is a slightly more fundamental one: why this particular collection of sigils, and no others? It’s not even necessarily about combining sigils: it just seems a bit arbitrary to me that a dialect can use @word or :word or #word or &word, but not $word or ~word or \word. And if we treat all of those uniformly, it makes sense to extend it even further to allow combinations of characters too.

I do see this as having real utility in dialects. For instance, a dialect to interface with C++ code might use this to refer to ::global variables. Or a statistical modelling library might want to follow precedent when talking about regression ~parameters. Or filesystem operations on Windows might want to refer to \\REMOTE directories… anyway, you get my point, hopefully.

@hostilefork

Note that in Ren-C, #ISSUE (probably going to be called #TOKEN) is an immutable stringlike type (no series position) that does not carry a binding. It's a unification of the CHAR! and ISSUE! types (a single-codepoint token is a character).

I think this is probably the single strongest argument against these ‘generalised sigils’: some datatypes need to have a different underlying representation, even if they look similar on the surface. I’m not sure if there’s a way to work around that.

@hostilefork

Having used the medium for quite a while, I'm far more concerned about the problems that would arise from having to distinguish META-GET-WORD!s from GET-META-WORD!s (or GET-WORD-META!s) than I am by the problems currently faced by some compositional desires.

Fair enough. But I think such things can be worked around: for instance, the parser could ignore the relative positions of the sigils, making :^word and ^:word merely two ways of spelling the same thing. (It already does this with e.g. {string} vs "string".)

@hostilefork

It's probably the case that the problematic compositions show when a design is at the breaking point where another angle of thinking is needed, than be evidence that the one-sigil-limit rule should be lifted.

I don’t completely understand this position. Is there any particular reason you feel this way, or is it more just a gut feeling?

@hostilefork

"The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed."

Indeed… which is why, when this seeming inconsistency makes me feel uneasy, I made this post to figure out which of the two must change!