A little TIL regarding syntactic sugar

Personally, I’d find a do block passed to a plain function really confusing because I’ve written Ruby for years where that’s the syntax (more or less) for passing an anonymous function that the recipient can call.

Other keywords like else would be confusing to any Elixir developer, since they evaluate earlier than expected:

foo = fn args ->
  args[:else]
end

foo.() do
  IO.puts("something")
else
  IO.puts("something else")
end

Oh absolutely, which is why I said it was useless. But often when I say stuff like that people come back with an “aaaaccctually, in this one case…” but ya, I was pretty sure there was no good reason for it. I was just using it to illustrate to my coworker there is nothing particularly “special” with how do works.

I like the fact that you explored the “but wait, what if?” I never thought of exploring the option

I never said I didn’t think about it, I just couldn’t come up with anything worth sharing.

You could use it to make an over-engineered version of this:

foo = (
  bar = do_something()
  # ...
  bar
)

def cache(do: block), do: block

cache do
  bar = do_something()
  # ...
  bar
end

But foo = () is pretty useless as it is since variables leak so

This is very interesting, for some reason I always thought that having the do: block is special syntax that is only available in macros.

In some sense it is special as while the generated AST is just a keyword list, the tokenizer knows this is a special keyword.

I meant “not special beyond what is already special about it.” I’m not the greatest communicator

I never said you did say that. So I am a bit confused by the reply. Guess we are misaligned in a world of non-native English writers .

Oh yes, I completely misunderstood what you were saying! Sorry about that!

I’m not the greatest communicator

I thought about disagreeing with your statement until..

All is forgiven. You are so active in the community, I would not dare to be mad at you! Thanks for all your effort!

Fixed: “mad about you” is something else

Ohhhhh I re-read your comment and I just completely mis-read it. I’m definitely a bad reader. I read it as:

I like the fact that you explored the “but wait, what if?” AND never thought of exploring the option

and was very confused.

edit: “mad about you” is something else