On Language Oddities

This post serves as an accompaniment to “JavaScript is Awe-ful” talk, and as a list of obscure language oddities

Let’s talk about Ruby

Bare words

In Ruby, there is no such thing as ‘bare words’. Some languages turn unknown objects into strings, but this does not exist in Ruby

irb> ruby bare words
NameError: undefined local variable or method `words'

However, unknown methods in Ruby fall through to a method called method_missing, which can be overloaded in userspace in order to handle unknown methods

irb> def method_missing(@args)
   >   args.join(" ")
   > end
irb> ruby bare words
"ruby bare words"

Although this is something that seems to be not a good way to handle code, it is how generic method functionality was used in Ruby on Rails 2.0. Custom methods based on user tables would be parsed based on a tokenization of the method name. For example, Customer.find_all_by_last_name(last_name) would be split into “find all_by last_name”, which would then search Customer based on the last_name field.

Operator Precidence

In Ruby, the order of operations places not in between the and/or symbols && || and the and/or keywords and or. Because of this, when used in combination with not, and and && are not interchangable.

irb> not true && false
false

irb> not true and false
true

Except for specific cases, stick to using and and or to avoid this issue, and to improve code readability (over && and ||)

Let’s talk about Haskell

Logical Length

In Haskell, there is native functionality to calculate the length of a list

λ> length [1,2]
2

However, the logic of this doesn’t apply to tuples or other set lists. Due to how fmap and folding functionaly works, the length of a tuple isn’t it’s logical length.

λ> length (1,2)
1

Function overrides

The let operator in Haskell allows for variable assignment. However, where can be used to define values for specific variable values, including overloading of integers.

λ> let a = 2 + 2
λ> a
4

λ> let b = 2 + 2 where 2 + 2 = 5
λ> b
5

Let’s talk about Pascal

Variable assignment

Pascal is one of only a few languages that uses = for equality and not assignment. In Pascal you use the operand := for assignment.

Program boop(output);
VAR x: INTEGER;
begin
 x := 41;
 x += 1;
 writeln(x = 42);
end.

TRUE

Let’s talk about Bash

Numeric operations

Bash doesn’t allow for native bare numeric operations. Unlike a lot of other languages, to be able to do mathematics in the command-line equations need to be evaluated and echoed out to terminal.

$ 4 + 2
bash: 4: command not found
$ $(( 4 + 2 ))
bash: 6: command not found
$ echo $(( 4 + 2 ))
6

Let’s talk about Elixir

Type coersion

In elixir, type coersion occurs when types are not defined. However, there are some issues when integers are interpreted to be strings, such as in this example:

iex> Enum.map(1..5, fn(x) -> x*x end )
[1, 4, 9, 16, 25]

iex> Enum.map(6..10, fn(x) -> x*x end )
'$1@Qd'

Let’s talk about C

Trigraphs

Although disabled by default in gcc, in some versions of c++ trigraphs are enabled by default. Trigraphs are combinations of punctuation that work around the limitations in ISO646 with regards to the available punctuation characters.

> printf("wat??!")
wat|

Let’s talk about Python

Numeric comparison using is

One of the many Python wats includes variation in the way integers can be compared, depending on their size. In this example, integers declared in separate statements that are larger than 256 are not the same object. However, defining them on the same line makes them reference the same underlying low level value, and are equal when compared using is

>>> a = 256
>>> b = 256
>>> a is b 
True
>>> a = 257
>>> b = 257
>>> a is b
False
>>> a = 257; b = 257
>>> a is b
True

If you need to compare objects, be wary of using is as opposed to object-type specific introspection.

Let’s talk about Java

Integer comparison

Simpler to the Python example, due to limitations in integer caching abilities in Java, some integers may not always be equal

java> Integer a = 1024;
java> Integer b = 1024;
java> a <= b
true
java> a >= b
true
java> a == b
false

Let’s talk about JavaScript

Unlike object concatenation

In the canonical JavaScript wat, concatenation operations in JavaScript of empty object types produce interesting results

> [] + []
""
> [] + {}
[object Object]
> {} + []
0
> {} + {}
NaN

Let’s talk about Scala

Unlike object concatenation

Like the JavaScript example, the concatenation of an empty object and an empty string in Scala produces an unusual result.

scala>  println({} + "")
()

Let’s talk about Swift

Inefficient nested dictionary parsing

Although slated to be fixed in Swift 2.2.3, complex static dictionaries are extremely inefficient in Swift, to the point where a 20-entry instance of the below example would take hours to compile.

let cat_cafe = [
   "cats": [
      "01": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "02": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "03": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "04": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "05": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "06": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "07": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "08": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "09": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "10": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "11": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "12": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "13": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "14": ["nyan": "mew"],
      "15": ["nyan": "mew"]
   ]
]

print("Cat count: " + String(cat_cafe["cats"]!.count))

$ time -p xcrun swift cats.swift
Cat count: 15</code></pre>
real 828.78

Let’s talk about Perl

Numeric equality

Numeric equality is achieved in Perl using ==, which is normally used for equality across all object types. However, because of this limitation, and the way that string casting works in Perl, using == to check if two strings are the same will always be true.

DB<1> if ("foo" == "bar") { print "true" } else { print "false" }
true

Use the generic eq for equality across any object type.

Let’s talk about PHP

Chained ternery operations

PHP has a ternery operand which allows for a short-hand way of doing an if then else statement.

The left command will be executed if the condition is true, the right if it’s false.

php> echo (TRUE ? "True" : "False");
True

However, unlike other languages with ternary operands, PHP’s version isn’t associative, so they cannot be chained in a way that resembles an if-then-else tree.

echo (FALSE ? "one" : FALSE ? "two" : "three");
three
php> echo (FALSE ? "one" : TRUE ? "two" : "three");
two
php> echo (TRUE  ? "one" : TRUE  ? "two" : "three");
two

It is recommended that you avoid this ternery form for anything other than a single instance chain

Let’s talk about Powershell

> and <

In PowerShell, you can use the operand > to achieve numeric comparison

PS> if (2 > 1) { "true" } else { "false" }
true

However, the < operator has not been implemented.

PS> if (2 < 1) { "true" } else { "false" }
The '<' operator is reserved for future use.

The complete set of comparison operands in PowerShell is -lt, -gt and -eq.