Daily Note - 2025-05-24
Hey, I'm Hanno! These are my daily notes on Crosscut, the programming language I'm creating. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please get in touch!
Pipe operators are a tried and true way to achieve
ad-hoc postfix syntax where you want that. But they are not
common in languages with C-style/curly-brace syntax. There, . is pervasive.
However, . is not a general operator for postfix function application (at
least not anywhere I've seen). Instead, it tends to be used as a special syntax
for things that only support postfix syntax (like accessing the fields of a
struct, or .await in Rust), or for method syntax (which deserves a dedicated
note; let's do that tomorrow).
These different usage patterns, plus the potential confusion with . in Haskell
(which is used for a similar purpose, but does function composition instead of
function application), makes me think that . is not a good choice for a
general "postfix function application" operator.
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