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Comment by laureny | Hacker News Reader

> Scala has very little syntactic rules

There are a lot of counter examples to this claim but just to keep this short, I'll go along with your claim.

A downside of this is heavy overload of keywords/symbols. For example, last time I checked, the underscore (_) has six different meanings depending on where it's used.

The number of syntactic rules is not a good way to judge whether a language is difficult to read, otherwise, Brainfuck would be the most readable language on the planet.

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> the underscore (_) has six different meanings depending on where it's used.

no it has not ,it always express some kind of default behavior. just like ! in ruby method means mutation or ? means it returns a boolean.

> The number of syntactic rules is not a good way to judge whether a language is difficult to read, otherwise, Brainfuck would be the most readable language on the planet.

But we are not talking about Brainfuck.

> > the underscore (_) has six different meanings depending on where it's used.

> no it has not ,it always express some kind of default parameter.

You might want to refrain from commenting on a topic you don't seem to know much about.

I was wrong when I said "six", it looks like the number is up to eleven today. Here is a short list:

- Existential types

- Higher kinded type parameters

- Ignored variables

- Ignored parameters

- Wildcard patterns

- Wildcard imports

- Hiding imports

- Joining letters to punctuation

- Assignment operators

- Placeholder syntax

- Partially applied functions

More details: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8000903/what-are-all-the-...

> You might want to refrain from commenting on a topic you don't seem to know much about.

the underscore is not an operator.that's why you are listing random stuffs that are not related. It express an intent, see my previous message.

You might want to stop patronizing people you dont know. Or your head is too big for that.

> it express an intent, see my previous message.

Actually, it can express eleven intents, depending on where it's being used.

! in ruby means "dangerous", which is actually poorly defined. In some major libraries it is used to mean exception raising, in some it means self-mutation.

  The bang (!) does not mean "destructive" nor lack of it mean non
  destructive either.  The bang sign means "the bang version is more
  dangerous than its non bang counterpart; handle with care". Since
  Ruby has a lot of "destructive" methods, if bang signs follow your
  opinion, every Ruby program would be full of bangs, thus ugly.