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Comment by xyzsparetimexyz

5 hours ago

I'd have just written this as a Python library that lazily evaluates expression via numpy personally. The API is useful, language is not

4 comments

xyzsparetimexyz

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kccqzy  2 hours ago

People do this kind of computation using numpy all the time. If you weren’t developing a new language with a new syntax, there really isn’t much of a library to write. At that point it’s just using numpy.

  • manucorporat  1 hour ago

    the language can do a lot of very expressive things, every language feature works in your favor too, but agree with you, i would not use my own language for anything production.

    like this:

    D ~ unif_int(1, 6); Print("P(rolled a 6 | rolled > 3) =", P(D == 6 | D > 3));

    or:

    loss ~ unif(0, 1000); claim = if loss > 200 { loss - 200 } else { 0 }; p = P(claim > 0); Print("P(insurer pays a claim) =", p)

    notice that "claim" is also a random variable! result of a if expression

    • kccqzy  26 minutes ago

      Yeah sure this is how numpy people would do it:

          N = 10**6
    D = np.random.randint(1, 6, N)
    print("P(rolled a 6 | rolled > 3) =", ((D == 6) | (D > 3)).mean())

    loss = np.random.uniform(0, 1000, N)
    claim = np.where(loss > 200, loss - 200, 0)
    p = (claim > 0).mean()
    print("P(insurer pays a claim) =", p)

      It’s concise enough that people generally wouldn’t bother writing a library. Unless they really want their custom syntax, then perhaps they write a parser.

mswphd  3 hours ago

that has some technical limitations. For example, their impl can compile to wasm, which makes giving an online interpreter simpler/lighter weight than relying on running python in the browser.