To be to the point; I've done Lua for awhile, but never quite got the terminology down to specifics, so I've been Googling for hours and haven't come up with a definitive answer.
Related to OOP in Lua, the terminology used include:
Object
Class
Function
Method
Table
The question is, when are these properly used? Such as in the example below:
addon = { }
function addon:test_func( )
return 'hi'
end
Q: From my understanding with Lua and OOP, addon is a table, however, I've read that it can be an object as well -- but when it is technically an object? After a function is created within that table?
Q: test_func is a function, however, I've read that it becomes a "Method" when it's placed within a table (class).
Q: The entire line addon:test_func( ), I know the colon is an operator, but what is the term for the entire line set of text? A class itself?
Finally, for this example code:
function addon:test_func( id, name )
end
Q: What is id and name, because I've seen some people identify them as arguments, but then other areas classify them as parameters, so I've stuck with parameters.
So in short, what is the proper terminology for each of these, and when do they become what they are?
Thanks
From my understanding with Lua and OOP, addon is a table, however, I've read that it can be an object as well -- but when it is technically an object? After a function is created within that table?
Object is not a well-defined term. I've seen it defined (in C) as any value whatsoever. In Lua, I would consider it synonymous with a table. You could also define it as an instance of a class.
test_func is a function, however, I've read that it becomes a "Method" when it's placed within a table (class).
You're basically right. A method is any function that is intended to be called with the colon notation. Metamethods are also methods, because, like regular methods, they define the behavior of tables.
The entire line addon:test_func( ), I know the colon is an operator, but what is the term for the entire line set of text? A class itself?
There's no name for that particular piece of code. It's just part of a method definition.
Also, I wouldn't call the colon an operator. An operator would be the plus in x + y where x and y both mean something by themselves. In addon:test_func(), test_func only has meaning inside the table addon, and it's only valid to use the colon when calling or defining methods. The colon is actually a form of syntactic sugar where the real operator is the indexing operator: []. Assuming that you're calling the method, the expansion would be: addon['test_func'](addon).
What is id and name, because I've seen some people identify them as arguments, but then other areas classify them as parameters, so I've stuck with parameters.
They're parameters. Parameters are the names that you declare in the function signature. Arguments are the values that you pass to a function.
a few days back i was trying the new ORM for delphi from Devart called EntityDAC, well i was reading the docs specific the LINQ part, when i saw something like:
Linq.From(Emp).Where(Emp['Sal'] > 1000)
got to say that wake me up the first moment i saw. the expression "Emp['Sal'] > 1000" isn't a lambda expression?! since the trial version is this component don't come with sources i couldn't figure out how Where function/procedure is declared.
reference: http://www.devart.com/entitydac/docs/ -> Linq Queries -> Linq Syntax -> Scroll down to Where session
I mentioned this in a blog post a few months ago. I don't have the source to look at, but it's almost certainly done this way:
The expression Emp['Sal'] returns a value of a record type
This record has operator overloads declared on it
The Delphi language defines operator overloads as functions, and does not require them to return any specified or intuitive type. Therefore, the > operator here does not return a boolean, but rather another record.
By chaining these operators, an expression tree can be created, which can be evaluated by their LINQ evaluator.
This question already has answers here:
How does this ruby injection magic work?
(3 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I know hash.map(&:key) function like hash.map{|element| element.key} because it call the to_proc on the symbol :key.
But why does array.inject(:+) work same as array.inject{|sum,x| sum + x }?
Thank you.
When the sole argument to inject is not a symbol, it is used as the initial value, otherwise, to_proc and & are applied to the argument, and that is used as a block. When there are two arguments, the first one is used as the initial value, and the second one must be a symbol, and would be used to create a block as described above.
A drawback of this is that you cannot use a symbol as the initial value of inject, but it is probably considered that there is no use case for that. I don't think this specification is clean.
array.inject(:+)
In the ruby inject method, when no block is passed in, it looks if the first argument is a symbol (i.e. :+) for the method to use. In this case it will recognize :+ as a symbol and know it needs to sum the entire list.
It is possible to use
array.inject(&:+)
which will call to_proc first and is slightly more inefficient.
You may want to use
array.inject(0, :+)
To return 0 (instead of nil) in the case where your array is of length 0. In this case your first argument is not a symbol, and so Ruby will look at the second argument for the method to use.
I'm playing w/ adding a little currying stuff to BlockClosure.
To have it done dynamically (ie. not hardcoding all the cases for different number of arguments of the original block) I'd need to construct BlockClosures dynamically, in order to pass the varying number of arguments.
Is there a way to do it, even if it involves some kind of dynamic eval/compile?
Have a look at this articles by Vassili Bykov:
Currying in Smalltalk
Currying in Smalltalk, part 2
Especially as i understood your question was about the varying number of arguments:
However, since Smalltalk blocks don’t support the equivalent of Lisp “rest” arguments, the curriedWithArguments: method would have to explicitly enumerate and handle all arities we realistically expect to use in block invocations. Using CurriedBlock instead produces a nicer example.
Is the following what you are lookig for? In a workspace try:
|myBlock|
myBlock := Compiler evaluate: '[ 1 + 2 ]'.
Now you have compiled a block from a string:
myBlock class -> BlockClosure
and can evaluate it:
myBlock value -> 3
I'm learning Elixir and wonder why it has two types of function definitions:
functions defined in a module with def, called using myfunction(param1, param2)
anonymous functions defined with fn, called using myfn.(param1, param2)
Only the second kind of function seems to be a first-class object and can be passed as a parameter to other functions. A function defined in a module needs to be wrapped in a fn. There's some syntactic sugar which looks like otherfunction(&myfunction(&1, &2)) in order to make that easy, but why is it necessary in the first place? Why can't we just do otherfunction(myfunction))? Is it only to allow calling module functions without parenthesis like in Ruby? It seems to have inherited this characteristic from Erlang which also has module functions and funs, so does it actually comes from how the Erlang VM works internally?
It there any benefit having two types of functions and converting from one type to another in order to pass them to other functions? Is there a benefit having two different notations to call functions?
Just to clarify the naming, they are both functions. One is a named function and the other is an anonymous one. But you are right, they work somewhat differently and I am going to illustrate why they work like that.
Let's start with the second, fn. fn is a closure, similar to a lambda in Ruby. We can create it as follows:
x = 1
fun = fn y -> x + y end
fun.(2) #=> 3
A function can have multiple clauses too:
x = 1
fun = fn
y when y < 0 -> x - y
y -> x + y
end
fun.(2) #=> 3
fun.(-2) #=> 3
Now, let's try something different. Let's try to define different clauses expecting a different number of arguments:
fn
x, y -> x + y
x -> x
end
** (SyntaxError) cannot mix clauses with different arities in function definition
Oh no! We get an error! We cannot mix clauses that expect a different number of arguments. A function always has a fixed arity.
Now, let's talk about the named functions:
def hello(x, y) do
x + y
end
As expected, they have a name and they can also receive some arguments. However, they are not closures:
x = 1
def hello(y) do
x + y
end
This code will fail to compile because every time you see a def, you get an empty variable scope. That is an important difference between them. I particularly like the fact that each named function starts with a clean slate and you don't get the variables of different scopes all mixed up together. You have a clear boundary.
We could retrieve the named hello function above as an anonymous function. You mentioned it yourself:
other_function(&hello(&1))
And then you asked, why I cannot simply pass it as hello as in other languages? That's because functions in Elixir are identified by name and arity. So a function that expects two arguments is a different function than one that expects three, even if they had the same name. So if we simply passed hello, we would have no idea which hello you actually meant. The one with two, three or four arguments? This is exactly the same reason why we can't create an anonymous function with clauses with different arities.
Since Elixir v0.10.1, we have a syntax to capture named functions:
&hello/1
That will capture the local named function hello with arity 1. Throughout the language and its documentation, it is very common to identify functions in this hello/1 syntax.
This is also why Elixir uses a dot for calling anonymous functions. Since you can't simply pass hello around as a function, instead you need to explicitly capture it, there is a natural distinction between named and anonymous functions and a distinct syntax for calling each makes everything a bit more explicit (Lispers would be familiar with this due to the Lisp 1 vs. Lisp 2 discussion).
Overall, those are the reasons why we have two functions and why they behave differently.
I don't know how useful this will be to anyone else, but the way I finally wrapped my head around the concept was to realize that elixir functions aren't Functions.
Everything in elixir is an expression. So
MyModule.my_function(foo)
is not a function but the expression returned by executing the code in my_function. There is actually only one way to get a "Function" that you can pass around as an argument and that is to use the anonymous function notation.
It is tempting to refer to the fn or & notation as a function pointer, but it is actually much more. It's a closure of the surrounding environment.
If you ask yourself:
Do I need an execution environment or a data value in this spot?
And if you need execution use fn, then most of the difficulties become much
clearer.
I may be wrong since nobody mentioned it, but I was also under the impression that the reason for this is also the ruby heritage of being able to call functions without brackets.
Arity is obviously involved but lets put it aside for a while and use functions without arguments. In a language like javascript where brackets are mandatory, it is easy to make the difference between passing a function as an argument and calling the function. You call it only when you use the brackets.
my_function // argument
(function() {}) // argument
my_function() // function is called
(function() {})() // function is called
As you can see, naming it or not does not make a big difference. But elixir and ruby allow you to call functions without the brackets. This is a design choice which I personally like but it has this side effect you cannot use just the name without the brackets because it could mean you want to call the function. This is what the & is for. If you leave arity appart for a second, prepending your function name with & means that you explicitly want to use this function as an argument, not what this function returns.
Now the anonymous function is bit different in that it is mainly used as an argument. Again this is a design choice but the rational behind it is that it is mainly used by iterators kind of functions which take functions as arguments. So obviously you don't need to use & because they are already considered arguments by default. It is their purpose.
Now the last problem is that sometimes you have to call them in your code, because they are not always used with an iterator kind of function, or you might be coding an iterator yourself. For the little story, since ruby is object oriented, the main way to do it was to use the call method on the object. That way, you could keep the non-mandatory brackets behaviour consistent.
my_lambda.call
my_lambda.call()
my_lambda_with_arguments.call :h2g2, 42
my_lambda_with_arguments.call(:h2g2, 42)
Now somebody came up with a shortcut which basically looks like a method with no name.
my_lambda.()
my_lambda_with_arguments.(:h2g2, 42)
Again, this is a design choice. Now elixir is not object oriented and therefore call not use the first form for sure. I can't speak for José but it looks like the second form was used in elixir because it still looks like a function call with an extra character. It's close enough to a function call.
I did not think about all the pros and cons, but it looks like in both languages you could get away with just the brackets as long as you make brackets mandatory for anonymous functions. It seems like it is:
Mandatory brackets VS Slightly different notation
In both cases you make an exception because you make both behave differently. Since there is a difference, you might as well make it obvious and go for the different notation. The mandatory brackets would look natural in most cases but very confusing when things don't go as planned.
Here you go. Now this might not be the best explanation in the world because I simplified most of the details. Also most of it are design choices and I tried to give a reason for them without judging them. I love elixir, I love ruby, I like the function calls without brackets, but like you, I find the consequences quite misguiding once in a while.
And in elixir, it is just this extra dot, whereas in ruby you have blocks on top of this. Blocks are amazing and I am surprised how much you can do with just blocks, but they only work when you need just one anonymous function which is the last argument. Then since you should be able to deal with other scenarios, here comes the whole method/lambda/proc/block confusion.
Anyway... this is out of scope.
I've never understood why explanations of this are so complicated.
It's really just an exceptionally small distinction combined with the realities of Ruby-style "function execution without parens".
Compare:
def fun1(x, y) do
x + y
end
To:
fun2 = fn
x, y -> x + y
end
While both of these are just identifiers...
fun1 is an identifier that describes a named function defined with def.
fun2 is an identifier that describes a variable (that happens to contain a reference to function).
Consider what that means when you see fun1 or fun2 in some other expression? When evaluating that expression, do you call the referenced function or do you just reference a value out of memory?
There's no good way to know at compile time. Ruby has the luxury of introspecting the variable namespace to find out if a variable binding has shadowed a function at some point in time. Elixir, being compiled, can't really do this. That's what the dot-notation does, it tells Elixir that it should contain a function reference and that it should be called.
And this is really hard. Imagine that there wasn't a dot notation. Consider this code:
val = 5
if :rand.uniform < 0.5 do
val = fn -> 5 end
end
IO.puts val # Does this work?
IO.puts val.() # Or maybe this?
Given the above code, I think it's pretty clear why you have to give Elixir the hint. Imagine if every variable de-reference had to check for a function? Alternatively, imagine what heroics would be necessary to always infer that variable dereference was using a function?
There's an excellent blog post about this behavior: link
Two types of functions
If a module contains this:
fac(0) when N > 0 -> 1;
fac(N) -> N* fac(N-1).
You can’t just cut and paste this into the shell and get the same
result.
It’s because there is a bug in Erlang. Modules in Erlang are sequences
of FORMS. The Erlang shell evaluates a sequence of
EXPRESSIONS. In Erlang FORMS are not EXPRESSIONS.
double(X) -> 2*X. in an Erlang module is a FORM
Double = fun(X) -> 2*X end. in the shell is an EXPRESSION
The two are not the same. This bit of silliness has been Erlang
forever but we didn’t notice it and we learned to live with it.
Dot in calling fn
iex> f = fn(x) -> 2 * x end
#Function<erl_eval.6.17052888>
iex> f.(10)
20
In school I learned to call functions by writing f(10) not f.(10) -
this is “really” a function with a name like Shell.f(10) (it’s a
function defined in the shell) The shell part is implicit so it should
just be called f(10).
If you leave it like this expect to spend the next twenty years of
your life explaining why.
Elixir has optional braces for functions, including functions with 0 arity. Let's see an example of why it makes a separate calling syntax important:
defmodule Insanity do
def dive(), do: fn() -> 1 end
end
Insanity.dive
# #Function<0.16121902/0 in Insanity.dive/0>
Insanity.dive()
# #Function<0.16121902/0 in Insanity.dive/0>
Insanity.dive.()
# 1
Insanity.dive().()
# 1
Without making a difference between 2 types of functions, we can't say what Insanity.dive means: getting a function itself, calling it, or also calling the resulting anonymous function.
fn -> syntax is for using anonymous functions. Doing var.() is just telling elixir that I want you to take that var with a func in it and run it instead of referring to the var as something just holding that function.
Elixir has a this common pattern where instead of having logic inside of a function to see how something should execute, we pattern match different functions based on what kind of input we have. I assume this is why we refer to things by arity in the function_name/1 sense.
It's kind of weird to get used to doing shorthand function definitions (func(&1), etc), but handy when you're trying to pipe or keep your code concise.
In elixir we use def for simply define a function like we do in other languages.
fn creates an anonymous function refer to this for more clarification
Only the second kind of function seems to be a first-class object and can be passed as a parameter to other functions. A function defined in a module needs to be wrapped in a fn. There's some syntactic sugar which looks like otherfunction(myfunction(&1, &2)) in order to make that easy, but why is it necessary in the first place? Why can't we just do otherfunction(myfunction))?
You can do otherfunction(&myfunction/2)
Since elixir can execute functions without the brackets (like myfunction), using otherfunction(myfunction)) it will try to execute myfunction/0.
So, you need to use the capture operator and specify the function, including arity, since you can have different functions with the same name. Thus, &myfunction/2.