I think the mistake I do (and many others) is trying to compare existing mechanisms from other languages, without the full picture around that mechanic. Every time I think to understand what a Monad is, its wrong. :D Guess I have to dive deeper to understand what that actually means, not just as an explanation. Just out of curiosity.

When I read about Monads, it looks like to me like generic Rust struct with a generic trait and a (more complex) result as a return value. I have no idea if this is what a Monad basically is or not. For context, I never learned Haskell properly (just tried hello world and read a few topics).

I think it doesn’t matter in what language you start, as long as it is the paradigm you are learning. You can still pick and choose the language later. Maybe start with a pure functional language, just to learn its concepts. Haskell comes to mind, but it kind of is not the best usable language in every day programming; its more academical nature in my opinion. I personally find Closure also interesting, but I’m not the biggest Java fan at all. At least the language is for practical usage.

Overall I am okay with slower build times. Its a tradeoff for the deep analysis while building. Its like using C and complaining that C is too low level… but that is probably just my opinion only.

https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/ - Edit: Ah I see, the author of this article is pointing to this older article too and admits being influenced by it. So never mind.

I just rewatched an interview with Kernighan / on SkipVideos that is 5 years old. Back then he was experimenting with Rust a bit and wanted to go back. I’ll watch this new presentation or interview at UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan / on SkipVideos later, so cannot comment here about the content at the moment.

And wow, I did not notice he was already 83 years young! And still teaching. Imagine your teaching being B. Kernighan.

I didn’t know you can change the linker in Rust projects manually.

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Is the linked .org site correct? I got this one https://vlang.io/

I never programmed in V, but it surely looks interesting. One interesting part is to have multiple paradigms and ways to manage the memory:

There are 4 ways to manage memory in V.

The default is a minimal and a well performing tracing GC.

The second way is autofree, it can be enabled with -autofree. It takes care of most objects (~90-100%): the compiler inserts necessary free calls automatically during compilation. Remaining small percentage of objects is freed via GC. The developer doesn’t need to change anything in their code. “It just works”, like in Python, Go, or Java, except there’s no heavy GC tracing everything or expensive RC for each object. Autofree is still experimental and not production ready yet. That’s planned for V 1.0.

For developers willing to have more low level control, memory can be managed manually with -gc none.

Arena allocation is available via v -prealloc.

Hi, I am not sure what you mean by this, because P … Q for inclusive ranges and P … Q for right-exclusive ranges both look identical to me. I have to check out those languages to see how they handle it, but I am already set.

Right, but this tool does more than just what jq does. The file format has some specifics like default values in global header area for specific data and so on. it provides lot of special features optimized for the end file format that uses JSON data.

Edit: To add an example what I mean is, JSON is like XML. It allows you to define a end format. JSON and XML are “encoded data”. Just being able to read JSON or XML is not enough to understand the format in its detail, if there are some complexities to it.

Sorry for late reply. I actually like the idea to use words to indicate start and end as well. But with additional “math like” features it gets a little bit complicated to parse for simple slicing as an option in a program. It makes much more sense to do this flexible thing in a language. BTW its shouldn’t be needed to have an end if you already have a negative number.

I use the empty string as indicator for start or end "..2" (BTW I switched to .. separator after long thinking, reading arguments and debating with myself).

Just as an idea, you could provide another variable mid so one could start counting from there (mid+2:end). And man the idea sounds really elegant to use [ or ( to indicate if the number is inclusive or exclusive. But I fear it could be a little bit confusing and people could forget which one is which. I would rather prefer special characters that are not used otherwise. In example both sides are always inclusive and there is a special character before or after the number to indicate its exclusion. A character that is not used otherwise in numbers or slices and is representing the exclusion unmistakably, and I have absolute no idea what this could be.

I have to say the usage of brackets to indicate its inclusion or exclusion is creative thinking!

A dash is a bit problematic from practical point of view. In example I allow single numbers without a colon like just 6 which would be interpreted as 6:6. And each element is optional as well, which would make -6 either be a negative number, an commandline option or a range? Some languages also use dots .. instead. If I want ever support negative numbers, then the hypen, dash or minus character would be in the way.

I mean I could just do a duck typing like stuff, where I accept “any” non digit character (maybe except the minus and plus characters) with regex. Hell even a space could be used… But I think in general a standardized character is the better option for something like this. Because from practical point of view, there is no real benefit for the end user using a different character in my opinion. Initially I even thought about what format to use and a colon is pretty much set in stone for me (Edit: this part didn’t age well) I recently switched to .. after long thinking.

I think that I’m going with these approaches. For the ‘0’, I’m now accepting it as the 0 element. Which is not 0 based index, but it really means before the first element. So any slice with an END of 0 is always nothing. Anything that starts at 0 will basically give you as many elements as END points to.

• 0: is equivalent to : and 1: (meaning everything)
• 0 is equivalent to 0:0 and :0 (meaning empty)
• 1:0 still empty, because it starts after it ended, which reads like “start by 1, give me 0 elements”
• 1:1 gives one element, the first, which reads like “start by 1, give me 1 element”

I feel confident about this solution. And thanks for everyone here, this was really what I needed. After trying it out in the test data I have, I personally like this model. This isn’t anything surprising, right?

Now that you ask, I don’t have any example of this. I know program head has negative numbers to access from the last element backwards ls -1 | head -n -1, but it does not start by 0. So yeah, the 0 as last element might be not as common as I thought to be.

No, that’s not an option here. This is a commandline program, something like grep in example. And this slice is just one of the many features the user could use to refine the output.

But contrary to that, often ‘0’ is also used as the last element or points to “the entire match” in example. Whatever that is. I feel like outside of programming languages, for the end user, its not that clear of an answer. Why I created this topic.

I’ll read the linked article and rethink this topic. Maybe introducing another option to make the index 0 based (or the other way 1 based).

First, thanks for the answer. As for the user base, its actually gaming oriented and they typically do not interact with 0 base. So I guess that makes for an obvious choice. And at the moment its also “inclusive”. To get one element user needs to 2:2. If user gives only one element, such as 2, then I could convert it into 2:2, to get one element. Sounds logical, right? Sorry for having so many follow up questions, my head is currently spinning.

Do you think this interferes somehow with the logic of a “missing” slice element, which would default to “the rest of the list”. In example 2: would then get the second element and until rest. This is the default behavior in Rust.

If I have a 1 based index, how would you interpret the 0? Currently program panics at Argument interpretation phase.

There are couple of factors that makes this a confusing topic.

Vim: On a high level, normally Vim (and Neovim) have their own clipboard system. Vim has multiple internal clipboards that can be used like variables and accessed with other commands. So its kind of sandboxed from your system. But you can explicitly use the commands to access the system clipboard. There is a configuration you can set to use the system clipboard by default.

Linux: Unlike Windows, in Linux we also have two kind of clipboards: the “system” clipboard as you know and the “primary” clipboard. This has nothing to do with Vim and is a feature on Linux systems itself. If you in example in your browser mark a text without copying, it is automatically copied into the “primary” clipboard. Then you should be able to access and paste it with middle mouse button in example. The system clipboard where you explicitly copy stuff is not affected by it.

You should read following documentation: 09.3 The clipboard - Neovim

Perverts!