Re: Recursion, Yo

On 12.04.2024 09:30, David Brown wrote:

 
I prefer the consistency of function calls using parenthesis.  The
consistent alternative, found in some other languages, is that they
never need parenthesis - "foo a b" calls "foo" with parameters "a" and "b".

Mind that this is just one "consistency" aspect.

Another one is that you can write (e.g. in Algol 68 or many other
higher level languages) the equivalent of - again a simple example -

  int x = 2 * pi * r

without necessity to know whether pi is a constant, the result of a
function (calculation), the result of a function implicitly called
just once on demand, or whatever else. Conceptually as a programming
language user you want the value.

I don't say one or the other is "better", just that consistence is
not an absolute property. (But also that Algol 68, WRT a consistent
formal language design, is indeed very different from C in quality.)

 
(Of course you'd need some syntax for referring to the function itself,
or its address - "fp = &foo;" would not be too onerous, IMHO.)

All repliers to my post mentioned references or addresses; I think,
beyond personal preferences, it is a key observation that this is
unnecessary if the language (and its compiler) handles that per its
semantics. In Algol 68 you can define  fp = foo  but you don't need
an "address value" introduced.

Preferences are probably heavily influenced by the set of languages
one started with, so it's not useful to dispute here. But I think it's
noteworthy to anticipate that it's not a "legacy" thing with languages
that evolved around 1967 to 1972; Eiffel and other important languages
(I think also Ada) later also took that path. It's also noteworthy
that these languages focus on programming safety; and I suppose that
there's no dissent here about the programming safety in C as opposed
to the languages mentioned in the other reply I just gave.

Janis