OK, I did it. The last feature I wanted to have in my intro toolbox — variadic functions. This time I borrowed the design from Scala, not from C# because I like it better — especially in cases when you use template function and it is unclear whether your array will be passed as one argument or expanded to multiple arguments:
var arr = new Array<Int>(5); foo(arr); foo(arr:~);
Assuming “foo” is variadic function taking “Ints” the first call is incorrect, only the second works because it unfolds entire array and passes the values one by one (technically it unfolds nothing, it is just semantic notion).
However even Scala is not complete — too often I need to write variadic function with at least 2 parameters. Since I didn’t see everything Skila has flexible limits:
func foo(params[2..20] p Int) ... func foo(params[2..] p Int) ... func foo(params[..20] p Int) ... // not too much sense, if you ask me func foo(params[2] p Int) ...
I could say this is the time I rest a bit, rethink syntax, try to write some programs for real, and finally upload the first version of Skila (no matter how embarrassing the code looks like — it is a mess, seriously).
But as it appeared with recent issue of Dr.Dobb’s I also have to read more about programming language Nimrod. At first glance it seems it is well designed, with similar concepts in mind as Skila — I would not like to duplicate the efforts so I have to make sure it is not the last stop for Skila.
Skila 