| 11 Dec 2025 |
 Charles | like this | 21:06:17 |
| Charles | e.g. imagine being able to do this instead of the workaround:
nix-repl> "1" = 2
Added "1".
nix-repl> i"1"
2
| 21:08:48 |
 helle (just a stray cat girl) | the rules for how strings vs substraction works does need to be easy to teach, so not too much heuristic pleaaaaase | 21:09:39 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | we wouldgo off on a massive UX and teaching this sort of stuff rant if we weren't feeling nauseous | 21:10:10 |
| Charles | if i were designing a language from scratch and i wanted support for more or less arbitrary identifiers, i would have two kinds of identifiers:
- literal identifiers, like
foo, foo_bar, _foo123, etc; XID_Start followed by >=0 XID_Continue
- string identifiers, like
i"..." to use an arbitrary string of characters and escape sequences to construct an identifier
| 21:13:16 |
| Charles | so a-1 would parse as identifer a minus literal 1, not an identifier a-1 | 21:14:18 |
 Rutile (rootile) | In reply to @charles:computer.surgery
if i were designing a language from scratch and i wanted support for more or less arbitrary identifiers, i would have two kinds of identifiers:
- literal identifiers, like
foo, foo_bar, _foo123, etc; XID_Start followed by >=0 XID_Continue
- string identifiers, like
i"..." to use an arbitrary string of characters and escape sequences to construct an identifier
This honestly sounds quire reasonable | 21:14:27 |
| Charles | if you want a-1 as an identifier you'd write i"a-1" instead | 21:14:32 |
| Charles | this way you get the convenience of literal identifiers for the common cases, - behaves in an obvious way, and i"..." is an "escape hatch" for other cases like i"1Password" or whatever | 21:16:19 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | so in addition to the formal form, I would always ask, "okay, so you are now teaching someone who just finished introduction to programming and introduction to Java, how would you explain this" | 21:17:26 |
| Charles | also i would probably want to define e.g. a and i"a" as syntactically equivalent | 21:17:39 |
| Charles | "if you want arbitrary characters in your identifier then you can wrap it in i"..."" | 21:18:12 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | yeah, and when does it become "arbitrary"? | 21:18:26 |
| Charles | immediately | 21:18:43 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | (because while most of the people discussing this here are aware of how to read documentation like this, it really needs to teachable to people who are not this deeply involved) | 21:18:45 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | also why the "i" choice (I mean I have some pros and cons to it, but one of the downsides is fonts not always being super clear with it) | 21:19:30 |
| Charles | alternatively you can replace "arbitrary characters" with "characters that aren't normally allowed in identifiers" | 21:19:38 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | welcome to me having some UX and teaching background :3 sorry about that | 21:19:55 |
