Comment by mkdir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkdir | Hacker News Reader

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Actually—I think you did explain properly. I must confess that I jumped into the sandbox before reading the documentation, and then I only checked the documentation when ran into behavior I didn't expect.

I do think the semicolon behavior is a bit confusing. The documentation explains that expressions aren't auto-returned if they're followed by a semicolon, but I don't think that quite covers the behavior I pointed out. I might be missing something else from the documentation, though...

Also, I found one more major issue. Your documentation uses the numeric literal "3.1415" in the explanation for named parameters. That really needs to be "3.1416". :P

> I do think the semicolon behavior is a bit confusing.

I agree.

Regarding the named params, the example is:

  f 
    3.1415 
    #name:"I'm using a named param!";

where 3.1415 is an unnamed parameter, and the 3rd line contains the named part. I'm probably showing too many things at once here.

Also, there are definitely a few bugs still to iron out!

Regarding "3.1415", I was simply passive-aggressively pointing out that if you're referencing pi, you should probably round up to "3.1416". The example itself made sense!

Ah, I'm so dense! Sure, there is also "math.pi" as a built-in for that. (And I fixed this grave rounding error)

I also discovered a scope problem with the recursion example you gave. Turns out, there is (of course) a major bug in there, thanks for discovering that. It's about the visibility of the "factorial" symbol itself, so the workaround is for now:

  factorial = { n |
    factorial = outer.factorial;
    if(n == 0) {
      1
    } {
      n * (factorial (n - 1))
    } 
  };
  println (factorial 5);

At least, until I restart the service (which I don't want to do while everyone is potentially using the tutorial).

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