Re: The Declaration Approach (was: Some thoughts on the 'reveal' operator) Chip Morningstar (chip@communities.com)
Thu, 21 Oct 1999 11:01:27 -0700 (PDT)

>I tried editing "reveal" in to some of my code, and I couldn't stand
>the way it looks. I'm still inclined towards an operator-symbol of
>some sort, suggestions solicited. If no one has a better idea, I'm
>going to go with "=>".

Any non-keyword symbol is going to be pretty arbitrary (which is why I like "reveal") but I *really* dislike "=>". For one thing, the arrow points in the wrong direction -- the value comes out of the function, but the arrow points into it (when this token was originally suggested, the arrow was pointing at the name of the variable that was revealed, not at the function itself). It also looks too much like ">=". You can't reverse the arrow because then you'd get "<=" which already has another meaning, as does "<-". Maybe you could use "<--", but I'm afraid that looks too much like "<-". If we're being completely arbitrary anyway, then you might use "@" (which I don't recall having another meaning in E). The best choice in terms of meaning seems to be "^", but we already dismissed that for ergonomic reasons. "&" maybe? Anything is better than "=>".