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0 pointschrisseaton6y ago0 comments

> If by procedural you mean, nonsense, then sure

Why are you being snarky?

They clearly mean the issue of modelling partial functions which would normally be done by a side-effect in a procedural language but can’t in a functional language.

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nixpulvis6y ago

No, they imply that the handling is done by returning a negative number.

I'm being snarky, as is my nature, to highlight the madness of a function called `getchar` returning anything but a `char`.

samatman6y ago

It's not a great snark given that the C standard considers the signedness of char to be implementation defined, making -1 a valid option, sometimes.

nixpulvis6y ago

I'm sorry you don't find it great (I still do). Integers are not characters.

Integers are numbers like -1337, 0, and 42.

Characters are things that compose strings of text.

These are not the same kind of thing at all. Just because APIs may be leaky, and some of these APIs are held in very high regard doesn't change that fact.

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chrisseatonOP6y ago

> the madness of a function called `getchar` returning anything but a `char`

It’s effectively returning a Maybe(char).

nixpulvis6y ago

But it's not.

A `Maybe<char>` has exactly one `None` variant. While an `int` has many, many negative values.

Also, just calling it `None` (or similar) makes clear what is meant, while `-1` is some magic value.

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nixpulvis6y ago

No, they imply that the handling is done by returning a negative number.

I'm being snarky, as is my nature, to highlight the madness of a function called `getchar` returning anything but a `char`.

samatman6y ago

It's not a great snark given that the C standard considers the signedness of char to be implementation defined, making -1 a valid option, sometimes.

nixpulvis6y ago

I'm sorry you don't find it great (I still do). Integers are not characters.

Integers are numbers like -1337, 0, and 42.

Characters are things that compose strings of text.

These are not the same kind of thing at all. Just because APIs may be leaky, and some of these APIs are held in very high regard doesn't change that fact.

2 more replies

chrisseatonOP6y ago

> the madness of a function called `getchar` returning anything but a `char`

It’s effectively returning a Maybe(char).

nixpulvis6y ago

But it's not.

A `Maybe<char>` has exactly one `None` variant. While an `int` has many, many negative values.

Also, just calling it `None` (or similar) makes clear what is meant, while `-1` is some magic value.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse