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conartist6 2 days ago

The proposal is to introduce a whole slew of syntax to JS that according to the proposal will have no meaning. This is a paradox. You have only created a language if you can use it to convey meaning

gaigalas 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's not entirely true. Ideally, there would be a follow up with a reflection API.

Also, comments are syntax and they're mostly meaningless. By your reasoning, programming languages should have no comments.

So, it's not really a qualitative issue (presence of meaningless syntax) but a quantitative one (presence of lots of parsing complexity).

conartist6 2 days ago | parent [-]

If you say that whatever data is put there doesn't matter at all, the one thing you definitely cannot ever do later is give it meaning.

gaigalas 2 days ago | parent [-]

Unless I say it's meaning is to be optionally reflected upon during runtime!

Look, I understand the purism and mostly, I agree. But this is not a clean slate language, it will never be perfect and it's going to become more and more idiosyncratic as times go by.

conartist6 a day ago | parent [-]

I don't see how it's optional.

Comments are a kind of freedom in code. You're completely free to use them precisely because (in a plain execution environment) they cannot influence the result of evaluation

If comments /can/ change the result of evaluation then you simply are not (completely) free to use them. (And yes I know that this is a simplification in JS where you can already get the source code of a function with toString... Ugh)

gaigalas a day ago | parent [-]

Makes sense. I'm excited for your solution, despite not having seen it. If you can solve that, it would be awesome.