Old Idea Revisited: DATATYPE as... Antiform?

[hostilefork]

@hostilefork

Originally the choice to make datatypes like &[integer] instead of words as &integer was that I wanted to use &some-function? as an inert type that could be passed to things like MATCH or use in PARSE

@hostilefork

I thought about putting quote marks on the datatype to reflect how much quoting there was:

>> type of first ['''a]
== '''[#datatype word!]

But I realized having quotes on the outside of the type had bad properties... it was no longer a datatype, it was a QUOTED!. And if you put it somewhere and it evaluated those quotes were easy to lose track of.

So as using a list type came up, I thought putting the quotes inside the list made more sense.

>> type of first ['''a]
== &['''word!]

Not that any of this is completely understood yet, but another advantage is potentially in terms of extensibility, since you can put any value in a list but not a sigil on any value.

So perhaps extension types are TUPLE!s or URL!s or something:

>> import http://github.com/Oldes/vector/vector.r  ; (Oldes loves vector!)

>> type of make vector! [...]
== ~{oldes.vector!}~  ; anti

; or something like

>> type of make vector! [...]
== ~{vector! http://oldes-r3.com/extensions/}~  ; anti

While I abandoned extension types for a while because of the mess they were making, it might be the right time to bring at least one of them back. But I don't want them to be in the core repository, so there'd have to modifications to the build process to bring things in from other repos.

(I've not yet taken that step, only put issue databases up for things like the ODBC extension where issues can be filed there, it's still maintained in the core repo for now.)