this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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If we were to create a Rust version of this page for Haskell, what cool programming techniques would you add to it?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

Mindblowing features are basically, by definition, a result of bad language design. They blow your mind, since they are totally unexpected behaviours. They may still be cool, but they are unexpected and hence unintuitive.

A language that are full of these is Perl. And one simple one is that you can take the string "AAAAA" and use addition on that, like "AAAAA"++ and you will get the result "AAAAB". Cool you may think, but is it really? Addition is normally used to increase the value of a number, that is a completely different operation than modifying a String. The string "AAAAA" cannot be said to be greater or less than "AAAAB", besides the very special case when we order it. But in general the name "John" is not considered to be higher/lower than "Mark", they are just different. So, even if it is cool to manipulate strings by using addition/subtraction, it is still bad language design and very unintuitive. Also, since perl is so loosely typed, it may also cause very unexpected bugs.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago

The general theme of your comment is good, but the example is...

The string “AAAAA” cannot be said to be greater or less than “AAAAB”

But in general the name “John” is not considered to be higher/lower than “Mark”

// rust
  eprintln!("{}", "AAAAB" > "AAAAA") // true
  eprintln!("{}", "Mark" > "John") // true
// C
  printf("%d\n", strcmp("AAAAB", "AAAAA")); // 1
  printf("%d\n", strcmp("Mark", "John")); // 1

strcmp() docs:

strcmp() returns an integer indicating the result of the comparison, as follows:

  • 0, if the s1 and s2 are equal;

  • a negative value if s1 is less than s2;

  • a positive value if s1 is greater than s2.

So basically, if C had higher level constructs, it would be identical to Rust here.

So, even if it is cool to manipulate strings by using addition/subtraction, it is still bad language design and very unintuitive.

Rust has impl Add<&str> for String and impl AddAssign<&str> for String. Both append as expected.

But maybe you meant numeric addition specifically.

In that case, yes, Rust doesn't have that, although it's an impl<'a> Step for &'a str away from having something similar (it would be ("AAAAA"..).next()).

impl Step for char already exists of course, but shouldn't if we take your argument to its logical conclusion.

Oh, and C would most definitely have this feature if it could. Numerical manipulation of chars is commonplace there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

The string “AAAAA” cannot be said to be greater or less than “AAAAB”, besides the very special case when we order it.

I hate it to break it to you but it's the same with numbers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Ok, I then have some business proposals....