June 25, 2020
1:59 a.m.
e.g., "or", and then I wonder "what does short-circuiting have to do with it?". All reuse of symbols carries baggage.
"or" brings an intuition of the execution order of pattern matching, just like how people already know about "short-circuiting". "or" 's operator precedence also suggests the syntax of OR patterns. As we have "|" as an existing operator, it seems that there might be cases that the precedence of "|" is not consistent with it in an expression. This will mislead users. You said "All reuse of symbols carries baggage", I'd say, All **inconsistent** reuse of symbols carries baggage, but the consistent reuse builds good intuitive sense and shows the good taste of designers.