"(though Racket is better on docs, but maybe I'm wrong)"
The docs for Arc range from nonexistent to outdated to poor. Racket's docs aren't that much better, but I agree that Arc's documentation is horrible.
However I haven't actually needed Arc documentation, because I can just open up arc.arc and read the definitions themself. My hardest thing with Arc is writing my own custom function/macro, only to realize later that it already exists. An example is `or=` which I didn't know about until rocketnia pointed it out to me. Ditto for `awhen`
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As for your suggestion for slice syntax, I already did that. You can find it here:
It won't work on the latest version of ar. I have a fixed version on my harddrive, but haven't pushed it yet...
With that library, you can now do this:
(foo 0 1) ; same as foo[0:1] in Python
(foo 0 5 2) ; same as foo[0:5:2] in Python
Basically, it takes (foo ...) and converts it into (cut foo ...) so (foo 0 1) is the same as (cut foo 0 1).
It also supports negative indices, just like Python. I tried to keep it very close to Python's semantics, as I think this is one of the (few) awesome things about Python. In fact, the only difference is the following:
(foo 5 0) -> error: start index must be smaller than the end index
foo[5:0] -> []
Great that it's already there. Is there a way to do foo[5:]?
And about docs - you are right, the best is to read the source-code. But the problem (as you pointed out) is when you have something you want to solve, it's hard to search for it in source-code. If you want to append strings and you don't know that + does it, source code will not give you an answer (unless you read the whole thing carefully). In Racket, you can search using human language in Racket Reference or Racket Guide.
Anyway, is there a centralized page, where you can get most links to Arc resources?
It's not as short as the Python version, but it works well enough. Basically, you can pass nil to mean the "default value".
That means that (foo nil nil) is the same as foo[:] in Python (this creates a copy of the list). The defaults are (foo 0 (len foo) 1)
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"If you want to append strings and you don't know that + does it, source code will not give you an answer (unless you read the whole thing carefully)."
Right. I was working on solving that as well, by grouping arc.arc into different "sections". So you'd have a section for "assignment", a section for "scripts", a section for "file system", etc. I believe this approach is actually better than English prose documentation. Unfortunately, I have not done this for the latest version of ar... it's only on my old branch[1], which is sorely outdated.
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"Anyway, is there a centralized page, where you can get most links to Arc resources?"
If you're looking for libraries, you can try Anarki[2], or rocketnia's Lathe[3], or my lib branch[4].
My branch currently has a library that implements slicing (already shown), a lib that implements a very simple and lightweight object system, a lib that implements a hacky (but working!) namespace/module system that uses inheritance, and a compiler that can take an Arc expression and convert it into a JavaScript string, that can then be executed in your favorite JS engine.
I should warn you that my arc2js library is severely outdated. I've made many many changes and improvements, and plan to push them to my branch (eventually). In addition, the import.arc library is very very hacky (in particular, the way it deals with macros), so I personally wouldn't use it just yet. It's mostly a proof-of-concept at this point.
