+1000 to "def" idea<div><br></div><div>I think the super verbose keywords can be an impediment to code readability. The increase in signal-to-noise, along with (imo) sexier looking code samples to show to prospective Racketeers is worth it. As silly as it might sound, when I started out, Scheme's notoriously long keywords gave it a superficial appearance of impracticality.</div> <div><br></div><div><div><font face="courier new, monospace">;; hot!</font></div><div><div><font face="courier new, monospace">(def x 12)</font></div><div><font face="courier new, monospace">(def y 15)</font></div><div><font face="courier new, monospace">(def z 12)</font></div> <div><font face="courier new, monospace">(+ x y z)</font></div></div></div><div><font face="courier new, monospace"><br></font></div><div><div><font face="courier new, monospace">;; not!</font></div><div><div><font face="courier new, monospace">(define x 12)</font></div> <div><font face="courier new, monospace">(define y 15)</font></div><div><font face="courier new, monospace">(define z 12)</font></div><div><font face="courier new, monospace">(+ x y z)</font></div></div></div><div><br></div> <div>On a related note - if we're looking to shorten some offending keywords, making a nice alias for "match-define" would be fantastic. It is a shame to have to use a 12-letter keyword to get something that is accomplished with "let" in other languages, especially since Racket's pattern matching is too awesome not to use. I sometimes define "val" or "mdef" as an alias for "match-define", but I'm always too embarassed to let such code escape my laptop.</div> <div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Neil Van Dyke <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:neil@neilvandyke.org" target="_blank">neil@neilvandyke.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Making new names for key things is a good time to revisit what those things look like and mean.<br> <br> I have no major requests for changes to "define", but perhaps someone else does. (I do, however, have a major request for the "let" family, but not a lot of time at the moment to advocate it, unless someone is going to mess with "let" now.)<br> <br> Neil V.<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br> <br> ____________________<br> Racket Users list:<br> <a href="http://lists.racket-lang.org/users" target="_blank">http://lists.racket-lang.org/<u></u>users</a><br> </div></div></blockquote></div><br></div>