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Message from discussion Creating a PrintWriter: No matching ctor found
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Rich Hickey  
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 More options Jan 5 2008, 10:48 am
From: Rich Hickey <richhic...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2008 07:48:03 -0800 (PST)
Local: Sat, Jan 5 2008 10:48 am
Subject: Re: Creating a PrintWriter: No matching ctor found
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On Jan 5, 8:55 am, Toralf Wittner <toralf.witt...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hmm. I confess I'm a bit puzzled by this whole boolean thing. I like the
> Scheme way of having #t for true and #f for false. Since in Clojure nil
> is used to represent false and null it seems to me that treating nil as
> a boolean is only logical ;-) So expecting (new Boolean nil) to resolve
> to the boolean overload follows directly from nil denoting boolean
> falsity. On the other hand the need to typecast nil to boolean looks
> weird to me. I wonder what's the advantage of having nil meaning false
> and null? Wouldn't it be better to copy Scheme and having a dedicated
> false value, e.g. :f which leaves nil for null?

You can't simply look at one facet of a language in isolation. nil,
Java null, conditionals and sequences all interact.

Please read this message, if you haven't yet:

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/ced660e69fd2aa0b

Also this:

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~wiseman/humor/large-programs.html

Scheme #t is almost completely meaningless, as Scheme conditionals
test for #f/non-#f, not #f/#t. I don't think the value #f has much
utility whatsoever, and basing conditionals on it means writing a lot
of (if (not (null? x))... where (if x... will do in Clojure/CL, and a
substantial reduction in expressive power when dealing with sequences,
filters etc.

I realize that people coming from Scheme might not see the value, but
it's there and I'm not willing to do without it.

I recommend everyone try to understand why Clojure is the way it is
rather than suggesting it become like Scheme in this area - it's not
going to happen.

I am happy to continue to explain how Clojure works and why, and am
prepping a little spreadsheet showing what Clojure/Common Lisp/Scheme
do in these areas to help provide semantic mappings and facilitate
understanding the differences.

Rich


 
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