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Ginger Names

Thoughts about a fundamental data type.

The ginger language has, so far, 2 core types implemented: numbers and names. Obviously there will be more coming later, but at this stage of development these are all that's really needed. Numbers are pretty self explanatory, but it's worth talking about names a bit.

As they are currently defined, a name's only property is that it can either be equal or not equal to another name. Syntactically they are encoded as being any alphanumeric token starting with an alphabetic character. We might *think* of them as being strings, but names lack nearly all capabilities that strings have: they cannot be iterated over, they cannot be concatenated, they cannot be split. Names can only be compared for equality.

Utility

The use-case for names is self-explanatory: they are words which identify something from amongst a group.

Consider your own name. It *might* have an ostensible meaning. Mine, Brian, means "high" (as in... like a hill, which is the possible root word). But when people yell "Brian" across the room I'm in, they don't mean a hill. They mean me, because that word is used to identify me from amongst others. The etymology is essentially background information which doesn't matter.

We use names all the time in programming, though we don't always call them that. Variable names, package names, type names, function names, struct field names. There's also keys which get used in hash maps, which are essentially names, as well as enumerations. By defining name as a core type we can cover a lot of ground.

Precedence

This is not the first time a name has been used as a core type. Ruby has symbols, which look like `:this`. Clojure has keywords, which also look like `:this`, and it has symbols, which look like `this`. Erlang has atoms, which don't have a prefix and so look like `this`. I can't imagine these are the only examples. They are all called different things, but they're all essentially the same thing: a runtime value which can only be compared for equality.

I can't speak much about ruby, but I *can* speak about clojure and erlang.

Clojure is a LISP language, meaning the language itself is described using the data types and structures built into the language. Ginger is also a LISP, though it uses graphs instead of lists.

Clojure keywords are generally used as keys to hash maps, sentinel values, and enumerations. Besides keywords, clojure also makes use of symbols, which are used for variable and library names. There seems to be some kind of split ability on symbols, as they are expected to be separated on their periods when importing, as in `clojure.java.io`. There's also a quoting mechanism in clojure, where prefixing a symbol, or other value, with a single quote, like `'this`, prevents it from being evaluated as a variable or function call.

It's also possible to have something get quoted multiple layers deep, like `'''this`. This can get confusing.

Erlang is not a LISP language, but it does have atoms. These values are used in the same way that clojure keywords are used. There is no need for a corresponding symbol type like clojure has, since erlang is not a LISP and has no real macro system. Atoms are sort of used like symbols, in that functions and packages are identified by an atom, and so one can "call" an atom, like `this()`, in order to evaluate it.

Just Names

I don't really see the need for clojure's separation between keywords and symbols. Symbols still need to be quoted in order to prevent evaluation either way, so you end up with three different entities to juggle (keywords, symbols, and symbols which won't be evaluated). Erlang's solution is simpler, atoms are just atoms, and since evaluation is explicit there's no need for quoting. Ginger names are like erlang atoms in that they are the only tool at hand.

The approaches of erlang vs clojure could be reframed as explicit vs implicit evaluation of operations calls.

In ginger evaluation is currently done implicitly, but in only two cases:

In all other cases, the value is left as-is. A graph does not need to be quoted, since the need to evaluate a graph as an operation is already based on its placement as an edge or not. So the only case left where quoting is needed (if implicit evaluation continues to be used) is a name on a leaf vertex, as in the example before.

As an example to explore explicit vs implicit quoting in ginger, if we want to programatically call the `AddValueIn` method on a graph, which terminates an open edge into a value, and that value is a name, it might look like this with implicit evaluation (the clojure-like example):

out = addValueIn < (g (quote < someName;) someValue; );

* or, to borrow the clojure syntax, where single quote is a shortcut:

out = addValueIn < (g; 'someName; someValue; );

In an explicit evaluation language, which ginger so far has not been and so this will look weird, we might end up with something like this:

out = addValueIn < (eval < g; someName; eval < someValue; );

* with $ as sugar for the `eval`, like ' is a shortcut for `quote` in clojure:`

out = addValueIn < ($g; someName; $someValue; );

I don't *like* either pattern, and since it's such a specific case I feel like something less obtrusive could come up. So no decisions here yet.

Uniqueness

There's another idea I haven't really gotten to the bottom of yet. The idea is that a name, *maybe*, shouldn't be considered equal to the same name unless they belong to the same graph.

For example:

otherFoo = { out = 'foo } < ();

out = equal < ('foo;  otherFoo; );

This would output false. `otherFoo`'s value is the name `foo`, and the value it's being compared to is also a name `foo`, but they are from different graphs and so are not equal. In essence, names are automatically namespaces.

This idea only really makes sense in the context of packages, where a user (a developer) wants to import functionality from somewhere else and use it in their program. The code package which is imported will likely use name values internally to implement its functionality, but it shouldn't need to worry about naming conflicts with values passed in by the user. While it's possible to avoid conflicts if a package is designed conscientiously, it's also easy to mess up if one isn't careful. This becomes especially true when combining functionality of packages with overlapping functionality, where the data returned from one might looks *similar* to that used by the other, but it's not necessarily true.

On the other hand, this could create some real headaches for the developer, as they chase down errors which are caused because one `foo` isn't actually the same as another `foo`.

What it really comes down to is the mechanism which packages use to function as packages. Forced namespaces will require packages to export all names which they expect the user to need to work with the package. So the ergonomics of that exporting, both on the user's and package's side, are really important in order to make this bearable.

So it's hard to make any progress on determining if this idea is gonna work until the details of packaging are worked out. But for this idea to work the packaging is going to need to be designed with it in mind. It's a bit of a puzzle, and one that I'm going to marinate on longer, in addition to the quoting of names.

And that's names, their current behavior and possible future behavior. Keep an eye out for more ginger posts in.... many months, because I'm going to go work on other things for a while (I say, with a post from a month ago having ended with the same sentiment).

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Published 2022-01-21

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