3 Common Programming Concepts

Keywords

I’m sorry, but the following just popped into my head as I was reading this: “When the text hits your eye shaded green by vi, that’s a keyword”.

Che schifo.

Identifiers

Lol, __ is a valid identifier:

fn __(x : u32) -> u32 { return x }

It’s nice that we can break through the identifier restriction with r# though.

Variables and Mutability

Very good to have to explicitly note where one wants a variable to be mutable.

Differences Between Variables and Constants

The way I like to think about constants is that a constant is data that you happen to be including in a source file, and is only ever going to be an input value in your program. It’s a strong commitment that a given name will always have a certain value (within a specific scope). const values also cannot be shadowed; the compiler will complain if you do:


fn main() {
const x: u32 = 3
println!("The value of x is: {}", x);
let x = 6;
println!("The value of x is: {}", x);
}

But the compiler’s tot totally fine if you do:


fn main() {
let x = 5;
println!("The value of x is: {}", x);
let x = 6;
println!("The value of x is: {}", x);
}

I really like the restriction on only being able to mutate values and not types. That’s very much like how IORef works in Haskell (I know, I know, another Haskell comparison, but at least it’s another positive one!)

Data Types

Does this mean that the .parse is polymorphic in its return values? I wonder if that’s implemented with traits/typeclasses.

Integer Overflow

I wonder why overflow is allowed in release builds at all if it’s considered bad when debugging. Furthermore, why should debug mode differ from release mode? I guess that might be okay if debug mode is more strict than release mode, so you have a guarantee that if it runs fine in debug it’ll run fine in release.

Numeric Operations

From Appendix B, it looks like a lot of these reserved operators are overloadedable via typeclasses!

Compound Types

These are just product types, yes? I guess arrays are actually dependently typed vectors. Very neat that Rust has dependent types, even in this very minor way.

Actually looks like the compiler does error if you do e.g. a[6] on an [T; 5], but not if you hide the index behind a layer of indirection. This is a little odd, I wonder why that is? Is there a macro that’ll automatically concretize an index referred to by a value so I can get compile-time bounds checking?

This naive approach didn’t work:

macro_rules! id {
($e:ident) => ($e);
}

println!("id(index) is: {}", id!(index));

I guess the macro doesn’t force the variable to resolve.

Functions

Statements are like expressions of type IO () in Haskell, they might do something, but they never return anything other than unit.

Actually I think this is literally true in rust, since the following typechecks:

let x:() = {let y = 6;};

So the semicolon in Rust is a little like saying return () in Haskell.

Control Flow

if expressions are really just like functions of IO Bool -> IO a -> IO a -> IO a

like all these are valid if expressions:

let x = if {let x = false; x} { () } else { () };
let x = if {let x = true; x} { () };
let x = if {let x = true; x} { 3 } else { 4 };
let x = if {let x = false; x} {;} else {;};

Repetition with Loops

loop is like IO a -> IO a

while is like IO Bool -> IO a -> IO a

I think the thing for loops are most like is list comprehensions, where .iter is just doing a toList conversion.

Exercises

1. Temperature conversion:
fn farenheit_to_celsius (x : f32) -> f32 {
(x - 32.0) * 100.0/180.0
}
fn celsius_to_farenheit (x : f32) -> f32 {
x * 180.0/100.0 + 32.0
1. Fibonacii:
fn fib (x : i64) -> i64 {
match x {
0 | 1 => 1,
n if n < 0 => 0,
_ => fib(x - 1) + fib (x - 2)
}
}