It's full of unnecessary noise and additionally very irregular. (With complete craziness thrown in between like the semicolon rule to "visually distinguish" procedures and functions, which must be a kind of joke I don't get).
I really don't understand how such a conceptionally well thought out language got this pretty ugly syntax.
(And no, you don't need such ugly syntax "because language features". Just have a look at Scala 3 that is much more powerful but maintains a clean, almost pythonic syntax).
Rust is in part designed to look familiar to C programmers. Rob Pike once famously described C syntax as able to survive a channel that mangled whitespace. That's less of an issue now, but habits die hard. Indentation in place of syntax is nevertheless controversial. That's a toy version of the bigger question: Why should text be required to carry a load that a smart editor can infer? In Clojure, some prefer ;; to ; because the comments stand out better. Um, syntax coloring? I dislike all comment characters, and for many years I preprocessed a practical version of "comments are flush, code is indented".
Ownership is nevertheless pure genius, and one can define more powerful operations on Rust's restricted notion of data than on general data. I'm imagining a "lisp without parentheses" that transpiles monadic parsers on steroids (aimed exactly at Rust data) to Rust. It will take me a while.
Rust may be accompanied by a design statement like that somewhere, but it actually does no such thing.
The majority of the lines I've ever written were in C. When I look at Rust, all I see is `{};`
(though in Rust's case I think it's more accurate to say it distinguishes between "statements and expressions" than "procedures and functions")
Yes, the distinction is important. That's why it's extremely annoying that this distinction is almost invisible if you don't look very close on the code using magnifying glasses. Like I said: Marking such an important distinction through something almost invisible like a (missing) semicolon is pure craziness.
Usually nobody reads semicolons! They are usually just line noise coming form a time as parsing code was actually still some kind of science and people made syntax with the explicit intent to be easy readable by archaic computers (and not humans in the first place).
I think `return`s are superfluous but given the choice between some more line noise in the form of a `return` statement and this semicolon brain-fart I would clearly prefer the `return`…
> (though in Rust's case I think it's more accurate to say it distinguishes between "statements and expressions" than "procedures and functions")
Since when? Did I miss something? (This could be, I'm looking only occasionally into Rust).
AFAIK leaving out the semicolon is only an option on the last expression of a procedure, turning that "procedure" into a function.
Leaving out (the completely unnecessary!) semicolons elsewhere is a syntax error to my best knowledge.
fn main() {
let baz = if false {"bar"} else {"foo"}
println!("Hello, {baz}!", baz = baz);
}
The completely unnecessary semicolons are just one of the examples that make the Rust syntax heavyweight and needless noisy for no good reason. I don't get how a modern language can fall back to such antique syntax.
The very rare use-case where you really want to write some comprehensive one-liner could have been easy supported by optional semicolons. But in the general case one just doesn't need that line noise.
Rust is a great language, really! But they obviously didn't put any effort into the syntax. The result is that the language reads partly like C++, and I guess almost everybody could agree that C++ has one of the most terrible syntax out there.
Rust is "modern" language with a stone age look & feel. That's a big missed opportunity, imho.
This is an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement to make, especially for someone who self-describes as "looking only occasionally into Rust". A whole lot of thought has been put into Rust's syntax.
> The result is that the language reads partly like C++
My impression is that a certain amount of this was intentional; if their goal is to attract C++ developers, they can't scare them off with syntax that's wildly alien. Rust took the parts of C++ syntax that made sense to keep and that fit into Rust's semantics, refined/modernized/distilled them, sanded off the rough edges and ambiguities, and presented something cohesive that's still familiar.
The syntax isn't without warts - turbofish comes to mind - but overall I find it pleasant and comfy (and I'm not even a C++ developer). I appreciate that it makes a lot of things explicit that should be explicit. Fewer characters doesn't automatically mean better readability; in many cases it can mean the opposite.
Ackshually moment here, but they did put a lot of effort into chosing syntax which would require very little look-ahead on the part of the parser (given current or even decade+ old parser tech). I don't understand their reasons for doing so at all, but that's what they did.
The result is... not very human-friendly IMO.