[erlang-questions] DRY principle and the syntax inconsistency in fun vs. vanilla functions

[Michael Turner]

Another objection raised against this syntax change is that all functional
languages violate DRY in this manner, so it's OK if Erlang does it too. This
is a Principle of Least Surprise argument, and not bad as far as it goes.
But how far does it go?

Erlang will have a better chance of greater success and survival if you
consider your recruitment base to be the overwhelming majority of
programmers. And from what I can tell,

  http://www.langpop.com

the overwhelming majority of programmers have no experience to speak of,
when it comes to functional programming languages. Appealing to the
"cross-training" benefit of coming from other FP languages seems like a
pretty weak argument. Especially since all I'm asking for here is syntactic
consistency *within* Erlang -- a PLoS argument in itself.

Richard O'Keefe suggests that the syntactic consistency goal is better met
by allowing a kind of limited-scope special-case fun name, permitting, e.g.

  Fact = fun F(0) -> 1; F(N) -> N*F(N-1) end.

I could get behind that too, but I don't follow his reasoning from syntactic
consistency, which is apparently that an unnamed fun has a name, it's just
the degenerate case of a name.  It's really there. We just can't see it. Hm,
really? If that were true in Erlang as it stands, shouldn't I be able to
write it this way?

  Fact = fun (0) -> 1; (N) -> N*''(N-1) end.

Looks like it's not quite that simple. It compiles, but it doesn't know what
module to look in for '', when it comes time to execute. In the shell, I get
an error indicating that it tried to resolve ''/1 as a shell command. Even
if I put it in a .erl file and compile it, there's no obvious way to tell
the compiler what module to look in. ?MODULE:'' doesn't work. Nor does
'':'', which I tried just for the hell of it.

What Richard's suggesting appears to require a rigorous re-think of how
scopes are defined in Erlang. What I'm suggesting amounts to simply asking
the compiler to do some of your tedious keying for you.

-michael turner


On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Michael Turner <
michael.eugene.turner@REDACTED> wrote:

> I can say
>
>    fun (1)->2;
>         (2)->1
>    end
>
> but, oddly, I can't define a named function in the analogous way, e.g.:
>
>    factorial
>      (1) -> 1;
>      (N) -> N*factorial(N-1).
>
> gives me a syntax error. I find the latter more readable than
>
>    factorial(1) -> 1;
>    factorial(2) -> N*fact(N-1).
>
> It's also less to type and to read, which is consistent with the DRY
> principle ("Don't Repeat Yourself").  And it lends itself to reading a
> function definition as a set of cases. I think for Erlang newbies, it should
> therefore would be preferred: it helps underscore the pattern-matching style
> of Erlang function invocation.
>
> It also looks a *little* bit more like the mathematical convention for
> defining these sorts of functions, where you have "f(x) = ", centered
> vertically to the left of a big left "{" that (left-)encloses the list of
> expression/parameter-condition pairs in a two-column format, e.g.,
>
>  http://cnx.org/content/m29517/latest/Picture%2047.png
>
> So there's a (weak) argument from the Principle of Least Surprise here as
> well.
>
> It seems to me that, if anything, this requires only a *simplification* of
> the Erlang parser. That leaves only one obvious objection: would any
> existing code break if Erlang syntax were altered to allow this?
>
> -michael turner
>
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