Design Discussion

This section is mainly here for brainstorming.

Indentation is important

In clojure, it’s very easy to leave additional statements that will be executed on a line above, looking like:

(dotimes [i 10] (readline)
  (readline)
)

In this case, we will read from stdin twice per loop, as the first statement after the dotimes input is on the same line as the declaration of the dotimes.

It’s a lot easier to look at the shape and understand the a block that will be executed is on the next line, and see that block as whole:

for i in 10:
  sys.stdin.readline()
  sys.stdin.readline()

It’s very clear here.

Deep Imports Are Helpful

Rust provides import syntax that allows ones to import specific functions from modules, like:

use module::{
  namespace::value,
  namespace2::{value1, value2},
  namespace3
}

This allows for:

• imports grouped by root location: helpful to see if an import is already added
• reduces

Use explicit “return” keyword

Rust allows two ways to return a value: either as the last execution in a statement, or with a return statement. The lack of a return statement makes it difficult to search for where termination would occur.

Conversely, it does make it difficult to support single expressions, since that would be easily written as a single expression and it would be clear that it is the return value. Maybe I’m not sure where I stand on this yet.