Named import sugar

[rossberg]

For more natural looks, allow declarations of the form

import X = "..."

as sugar for

let X = import "...";

analogous to other forms.

[nomeata]

Oh, we don’t have that yet? I fully agree and I think we always wanted that.

[nomeata]

Shouldn’t this be

import P "../../prelude.as"

now, i.e. without the =, just like for actor?

[nomeata]

Oh, judging from the parser we can actually write

let a = actor { … } // 1
actor a { … }  // 2
actor a = { … } // 3

I did not know that :-/

Do we need both 2 and 3? (At least I got used to 2 and am surprised that 3 works as well).

[rossberg]

Yeah, I'm not happy with having both. The only place where you occasionally need the third form is with class, since it's not syntactically possible to name self otherwise.

My functional programmer mind would prefer removing (2) and sticking to (3), but I suppose curly braces folks expect (2)...

[nomeata]

Our users in stdlib/ wildly mix 2 and 3 for class, 2 for actor, don't have named new, don’t have object, and wildly mix 2 and 3 for func.

Just to avoid us spending too much time on such discussions I will refrain from arguing for either 2 or 3 (but express a preference to having just one of them) :-)

[rossberg]

Fair enough, but independent from this PR, I presume.

[nomeata]

yes, absolutely

[crusso]

I'm ok with this.