[racket-dev] `take' argument order

From: Shriram Krishnamurthi (sk at cs.brown.edu)
Date: Thu Jun 9 08:55:02 EDT 2011

While having a copy of Shrunk and Whiteout thrown at us, no less.

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 6:43 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> Man, I recall a slightly different sentiment when you edit papers we
> co-author. :)
>
> Robby
>
> On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 8:50 PM, Matthias Felleisen <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> "Take from the sequence of primes the first five numbers and add them up." This is at most slightly mangled :-)
>>
>>
>> On Jun 8, 2011, at 11:38 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>>
>>> 6 minutes ago, Stephen Bloch wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Jun 8, 2011, at 9:55 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> ... the
>>>>> justification for the argument order in Haskell is not laziness but
>>>>> its implicit currying -- so of course it shouldn't be a reason to make
>>>>> lazy racket follow it.]
>>>>
>>>> Another justification for Haskell's argument order is compatibility
>>>> with English: "take 5 primes" makes a lot more sense than "take
>>>> primes 5".  It could be argued that compatibility with English is
>>>> even more important than compatibility with Clojure, or Haskell, or
>>>> SRFI/1, or racket/typed....
>>>
>>> That counters a lot of existing racket functions (`list-ref' vs "the
>>> nth element of"), and worse -- it contradicts some uniformity (if you
>>> follow English, then `for-each' should not have the same order as
>>> `map').
>>>
>>> --
>>>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>>>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
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