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by rowanG077 301 days ago
The entire discussion is about a property assignment. Which in colloquial usage is also called variable assignment. Which is obvious since nobody corrected you on that. You now trying to do a switcheroo is honestly ridiculous.
1 comments
dvt 301 days ago
The entire discussion is about “=“ doing weird stuff, which in 99.9% of cases it does not do. And my point was that no language, without doing weird stuff (like overloading), does not let “=“ do weird stuff (and thus is pure). The counterarguments all involve nonstandard contracts. Therefore, thinking that using “=“ will have some magical side-effect is absolutely never expected by default.
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JoshTriplett 301 days ago
> The counterarguments all involve nonstandard contracts. Therefore, thinking that using “=“ will have some magical side-effect is absolutely never expected by default.

That sounds like a recipe for having problems every time you encounter a nonstandard contract. Are you actually saying you willfully decide never to account for the possibility, or are you conflating "ought not to be" with "isn't"?

If I'm programming in a language that has the possibility of properties, it's absolutely a potential expectation at any time. Which is one reason I don't enjoy programming in such languages as much.

To give a comparable example: if I'm coding in C, "this function might actually be a macro" is always a possibility to be on guard against, if you do anything that could care about the difference (e.g. passing the function's name as a function pointer).

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scheme271 301 days ago
So, with anything that isn't a primitive type (e.g. int, bool, etc), there's a chance that assignment is going to require memory allocation or something similar. If that's the case then there's a chance of bad things happening (e.g. a out of memory error and the program being killed).

More commonly, if you look at things like c++'s unique_ptr, assignment will do a lot of things in the background in order to keep the unique_ptr properties consistent. Rust and other languages probably do similar things with certain types due to semantic guarantees.

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eru 301 days ago
In languages like JavaScript (or Python etc) you can get memory allocation etc even when 'primitives' like int and bool are involved.

Haskell is the same, but for different reasons.

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