anonymous record updates · beginners

Hey all, I've been looking for a good first issue and it seems like the anonymous record update syntax issue would be a useful addition that's easy to model after the anonymous field accessor code. It's suggested to check here to make sure the issue is still relevant, which I expect is true based on the utility. Also, just to check, record updates are not valid for tuple "records", just standard records, right?

Sam Mohr (May 02 2023 at 05:52):

&foo
-- updates to
\record, val ->
    { record & foo: val }

&0
-- updates to
\record, val ->
    { record & 0: val }

Richard Feldman (May 02 2023 at 05:53):

Sam Mohr (May 02 2023 at 05:56):

Looking forward to finally committing to a language I want to use. I have good confidence that Roc will succeed being backed by NoRedInk and friends, especially after watching "Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm?"

Sam Mohr (May 02 2023 at 06:01):

Sam Mohr (May 02 2023 at 17:33):

Gabriel Dertoni (May 02 2023 at 17:38):

Hey, I would be interested in collaborating on this. I think I am pretty close to having an initial version working. However, I am a bit stuck trying to figure out how the type inference code works.

Gabriel Dertoni (May 02 2023 at 17:41):

For the most part I just duplicates the field accessor code and changed things where necessary. Later today I can push to my fork of roc so you can have a look.

Sam Mohr (May 02 2023 at 17:44):

Sam Mohr (May 02 2023 at 17:47):

I'll also push my code later. Hey, what are you thinking should be the name for the anonymous record updater syntax? Since the record access syntax is called both RecordAccessor and RecordAccessorFunction, I think a literal RecordUpdaterFunction is the most readable name. I wish there was something terser that was as clear, but I don't see anything in the thesaurus.

Gabriel Dertoni (May 02 2023 at 19:39):

Yep, I used something like this. Since the variants for record access and accessor were named respectivelly RecordAccess and RecordAcessor and there is already a RecordUpdate, I named the new variant RecordUpdater. and UpdaterFunction in the AST.

Gabriel Dertoni (May 03 2023 at 06:39):

I have managed to finish an initial implementation and have opened a pull request https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/pull/5367. If you have any feedback or differences from your implementation you would like to discuss, let me know.

Gabriel Dertoni (May 03 2023 at 06:43):

In order to make this syntax even better, I think we should support nesting, like &foo.bar.baz.

Sam Mohr (May 03 2023 at 16:33):

Left some comments on the PR, looks good! I've got some test_syntax tests I can add. I'll start by putting them in my branch and you can consider pulling them into your PR.

Stream: beginners

Topic: anonymous record updates

Sam Mohr (May 02 2023 at 05:49):