Danilo J. S. Bellini writes:
I'm not talking about "simple cases", but about quite general cases, general in the sense that it allows modeling time varying models (and the proposal is about recursion, whose computational power should be obvious).
I think I admitted that in the text you snipped. If not, consider it stipulated here. My point is that for me functions like accumulate are sufficient without new syntax, and if you are going to do time- varying stuff in the kind of economics I studied and research, you are going to need to carry around so much state that the relative amount of simplicity you can gain with syntax is very small. As for recursion, the syntax you proposed doesn't say "recursion" to me, it says "let's add more complexity to a syntax that already is hard to fit on a line so we can turn a sequence into a series."
Anyway, that makes this talking about computational accuracy sound like an argument for my proposal here, not against it.
Not as I see it. My point is that functions like accumulate already get me as much of your proposal as I can see being useful in my own applications, and so I'd rather spend effort on the inherent complexity of accurate computation than on learning new syntax which as far as I can see buys me no extra simplicity. Consider the existing comprehension syntax. I use it all the time because it's very expressive, it "looks like" what I would write in a declarative mathematical definition, and the constructive alternative is not a function call, it's a loop, in many cases with a nested if test as well. However, when you try to express more than one loop with a comprehension, you end up with a counterintuitive ordering based on the current "this expands naturally to for loops and if conditionals according to this simple rule" syntax, along with a separation of the result expression from the loop where it's actually produced. It's not obvious to me that use of comprehension syntax beyond [ f(x) for x in y if g(x) ] is all that useful, but that very basic form is extremely useful by itself. If your proposal will help make more complex comprehensions easy to understand, then you've got something I'd like to have. But I don't yet see how it fixes that, and if not, I ain't gonna need it and I don't want to have to explain it to my students when they ain't gonna need it either.
Is there any previous discussion on this topic or something related to it? Where's the link? (I asked it before)
I don't have one off-hand (I really am interested only in the claimed uses in economics). As I wrote earlier, maybe David Mertz does.
Actually, that's an argument for this proposal, not against. I'm proposing a way to avoid itertools.accumulate and functools.reduce using an explicit syntax instead of the functions. Or does GvR prefer map/filter instead of list comprehensions?
itertools functions are widely used and generally well-thought-of. Avoiding accumulate is a non-goal AFAIK. AIUI, Guido does think that avoiding reduce is a goal, but I believe that's because he thinks the semantics are just plain hard to understand. If your syntax is in large part a substitute for reduce, I doubt he will like it more than reduce just because it's syntax. (I do not speak for Guido; I offer my observation in the hope it will help you prepare to present your idea to him in the most favorable light.)
If you're right, then we should be consistent and propose the elimination of list comprehension and every syntax alike. The arguments you're giving against my proposal are the same.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." If Emerson hadn't lived a century before Tim, I'm sure it would be in the Zen. That is, comprehensions are clearly useful, and I use them in almost every program I write. I still don't see when I'd ever strongly prefer the syntax you propose to the itertools we already have, so I don't care if it's a consistent extension. That doesn't mean it's not useful to you or others, it just means I'm not convinced -- and so I will not join the proponents. That's all.