00:29 <Pyrrh> SeanTAllen: sorry, was afk. About to head to dinner, will ping you when I'm back

09:43 <Candle> Where can I find documentation about the various integer conversions and their behaviour; i.e. U128.u32() probably truncates to the lowest 32 bits; U32.i32() when the U32 is greater than 2^31; I64.i32() can just truncate (and therefore have some off behaviour WRT the sign bit!) or can try to preserve the sign.

09:45 <Candle> How is the pony-ast comming along (I want to use it to re-vamp the auto-generated docs with things like a summary, sorting of fields/methods -- and write it in pony, it seems a little odd to have that in C)

14:25 <SeanTAllen> Candle: I don't believe the truncation is commented on anywhere. That would end up being platform specific (little vs big endian). It's an interesting topic. I would say "package level documentation" would the right place to document but those are all in the magic "builtin" package which complicates it a little. Would you be interested in documenting? At the moment, when we cant figure out where to add something it

14:25 <SeanTAllen> ends up in the Appendix of the Tutorial until such time as we have a good place for it.

14:28 <SeanTAllen> Re: Pony-ast. That's a question for jemc. My basic statement would be that Pony in Pony is a long term project and that waiting for it to make changes to auto-generated docs means you are going to be waiting a long time. If you feel the changes are important, I'd seriously consider doing in C. If you are interested in working on the autogenerated docs, there's a number of areas of improvement that could make it

14:28 <SeanTAllen> much more flexible to work with. In particular, right now, we generate docs in a format that mkdocs can immediately consume. Having C code that generates an intermediate format that you could be turned into other formats would go a long way to making things better. Then, rather than worrying about generating correct mkdocs, you worry about creating an intermediate format that makes it easy for you to write a Pony

14:28 <SeanTAllen> program to turn into mkdocs or any other format. I think that is the best way forward for now. Happy to talk more about that if you are interested.

14:50 <codec1> Hi, since there are a few people around here with probably a good knowledge of Pony I would like to ask if you know other languages similar to Pony that are not purely academical?

14:51 <codec1> And by similar to Pony I mean a statically typed language with emphasis on correctness

14:53 <codec1> From somewhat mainstream languages I think Swift and Rust may be part of that category, but white strike me is that this category of languages is rather empty and I find that weird

14:54 <codec1> So am I just plain wrong? or what are your thoughts on that ?

14:56 <SeanTAllen> codec1: thats a rather open question. "emphasis on correctness" is very open to interpretation. as is "academic".

14:57 <SeanTAllen> I think it would be far to say that there are a number of "new" languages that are interested in having the compiler help eliminate certain classes of errors that you find in other languages.

14:57 <SeanTAllen> What those errors are varies from language to language.

14:57 <SeanTAllen> Haskell, while not new, is certainly interested in this.

14:57 <SeanTAllen> Rust as you mentioned.

14:57 <SeanTAllen> Swift to an extent as well.

14:59 <codec1> I always found Haskell weird in that regards, because it has a great type system, but somehow just indexing a List with a out bound value get you a runtime error

15:00 <SeanTAllen> you get a runtime error in Pony as well. the pony compiler however, requires you to handle it. it is still, however, a runtime error.

15:01 <codec1> yes, but it is explicit and the user acknowledge it, which what I mean by emphasis on correctness

15:02 <codec1> it's like exception, I am not against them per se, but in most languages I know they can be thrown anywhere without knowing it

15:02 <codec1> and I find that in a statically typed language that kind of thing defeat (to a certain extend) the value of a static type system

15:03 <codec1> And what blows my mind that Java has checked exception but nowadays they are somewhat deprecated

15:05 <codec1> anyway, back to the original question

15:05 <codec1> from what language Pony draw inspiration?

15:10 <SeanTAllen> amongst others: ML, smalltalk, erlang, E, midori

15:10 <SeanTAllen> certainly C as well

15:11 <SeanTAllen> "inspiration" is a rather broad term. the list could go on and on.