Define object methods

[hydroper]

Grain looks very cool, but I've searched a little about object methods and found nothing. It looks like instead of "".charAt(i) you've to do String.charAt(i, ""). It'd be nice if there was something like:

let charAt = (i, self) => ...

Then you can do "".charAt(i). You should be able to put self anywhere.

[alex-snezhko]

Grain doesn't leverage the object oriented paradigm very heavily so being able to attach methods to types likely won't be added, but when #403 and #402 get implemented (they're on the radar but aren't an immediate priority right now) you'd be able to use |> as an approximation for . when doing object.method. So for example you could represent what you'd write as list.map(x => x * 2).reverse() in an object-oriented language as list |> partial List.map(x => x * 2, _) |> List.reverse in Grain.

[hydroper]

I never understood this |> in functional languages: so it's basically a way to bind a function to some arguments, right? Interesting

[alex-snezhko]

Kind of, I believe the |> syntax was popularized by F# and it just applies the left side operand as a single argument to the right side function. Since F# uses curried function application, if it used Grain-style syntax it would just be let (|>) = (arg, fn) => fn(arg). Other non-curried languages like Elixir and Gleam borrowed this syntax as well to mean "apply the LHS as the first argument to the RHS function"