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by zverok 978 days ago
I made a small nod towards Haskell's way of doing things in the last paragraph of "How others do it" section:

> We might also start look into the concept of the “tacit programming”, which, from some point of view, is also about “not repeating the arguments,” but this would be a much longer post—while it is obscenely long already.

Note though that my analysis was mostly about "how you would do that in an established language," not "how would I design a language from scratch." And Ruby is very different from Haskell in its syntax, semantics, and typical intuitions of the language writer and reader.

So designing a solution for clearer representation of "default parameters" is quite different in a language which is built around an `object.method(argument) { block }` as its atomic phrase, and one built around `function(arguments)`. (This can turn into a discussion of which phrase structure is more elegant in general... But I believe it was already done quite a few times in a history of programming languages evolution!)