Comment by fulafel
2 hours ago
It's unrelated to the lazy keyword. Instead it's another feature related to error messages.
The example:
>> 'hello'.toUpperCase()
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'toUpperCase'. Did you mean '.upper'?
In the Rust toolchain we've done the same. It just so happens that rustdoc already has introduced annotations for "aliases" so that when someone searches for push and it doesn't exist, append would show up. Having those annotations already meant that bootstrapping the feature to check the aliases during name resolution errors in rustc was almost trivial. I love it when improving one thing improves another indirectly too.
I really appreciate them going out of their way to do this, being quite aware of the hidden complexity in doing it.
I’ve often thought it would be funny if instead of an error message for stuff like this, a language could be designed to be “typo-insensitive”. If a method or function call is similar enough to an existing one or a common one from other languages, to just have it silently use that.
VisualBasic did that. I think it is a mistake. But that doesn't mean that the compiler can't detect that and tell you how to fix it instead.
Sure VB ignores case, but what I want is for it to compare each method against a dictionary of similar terms. And maybe calculate the Levenshtein distance between all terms if it’s not found, and just assume it’s the closest one. You could also assume that full-width characters or similar-looking glyphs are equivalent (BASIC was pre-Unicode, so I can forgive them for not including that).
Lisp had a package for that, DWIM, in the late 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM.
I hope you mean "funny" in the "hilarity ensues" sense.
Because the alternative is a rather sociopathic level of schadenfreude.
Yes, I say “funny” because it would be impractical and weird, definitely not a good idea. It’s already a bad enough that so many popular languages don’t (and can’t) check if a field or method is misspelled at compile time…