[erlang-questions] erlang improvement - objective c (or smalltalk) syntax

[Christian]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 12:08, Bengt Kleberg <bengt.kleberg@REDACTED> wrote:
> 1) I would still need to look in the documentation. No longer to find
> the position, but to find out the names/spelling of the arguments. Is it
> string: or str:, start: or first: and is it length: or chars:?
>
> 2) I do not find it more beneficial to write
> string:substring( string:S start:I length:J ), instead of
> string:substring( String, Start, Length ).

You would still have to look it up, not necessarily though the
documentation, a listing of exported functions from the string module
is enough. If you would see the function in its canonical form you
would know the names and their spelling.

This reminds me about another useful feature that "we have the
techology" for: one-liner documentation strings that could be
displayed in the shell when tab-completing. Richard Carlsson once
mentioned that one-line summaries was fully within his intention with
edoc.

An advantage of having code be self-documenting (as in joe's objc
appraoch) is that you don't risk having documentation that was not
updated when code was updated. But docstrings are more free form and
could point out other useful facts.