On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:22 PM, average <dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:

What's misleading about framing this discussion is that all of us are [over]used to the "flatland" of the program editor.  Code blocks appear on the screen like any other code, but the *critical* point is that LOGICALLY they are ORTHOGONAL to it.  Where most of your code could be organized in a tree-like fashion rooted in your program's "main" node, code blocks are orthogonal and are really like leaves spanning back into the screen to a *different* tree's root (the *application's* surface) hence its subtlety.

That's only one use of callbacks. One could claim that a confusing part of anonymous blocks (as used in SmallTalk and Ruby) is that they use the same syntax for both use cases: you can't tell from the syntax whether the block is executed in the place where you see it (perhaps in a loop or with an error handler wrapped around it, or conditionally like in SmallTalk's "if" construct), or squirreled away for later use (once or many times). The good thing about function syntax (as used in JavaScript's anonymous blocks) is that it leaves no doubt about these two different uses: at least by convention, anonymous functions are used for asynchronous programming, while in-line code uses regular block syntax. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:22 PM, average <dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:

What's misleading about framing this discussion is that all of us are [over]used to the "flatland" of the program editor.  Code blocks appear on the screen like any other code, but the *critical* point is that LOGICALLY they are ORTHOGONAL to it.  Where most of your code could be organized in a tree-like fashion rooted in your program's "main" node, code blocks are orthogonal and are really like leaves spanning back into the screen to a *different* tree's root (the *application's* surface) hence its subtlety.

That's only one use of callbacks. One could claim that a confusing part of anonymous blocks (as used in SmallTalk and Ruby) is that they use the same syntax for both use cases: you can't tell from the syntax whether the block is executed in the place where you see it (perhaps in a loop or with an error handler wrapped around it, or conditionally like in SmallTalk's "if" construct), or squirreled away for later use (once or many times). The good thing about function syntax (as used in JavaScript's anonymous blocks) is that it leaves no doubt about these two different uses: at least by convention, anonymous functions are used for asynchronous programming, while in-line code uses regular block syntax. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)