Nick Sabalausky wrote:
There are many possible reasons for a failed language's failure. One of the
biggest is lack of visibility. Who has ever heard of IMP72? Sure, that lack
of visibility could have been because people hated that particular aspect of
the language, but it could also have been from any one of a number of other
reasons.
As I said, there were many languages with configurable syntax created
during that period. None was even remembered. But then, correlation is
not causation :o).
The second reason was that I've had many coffees and some beers with
Walter and he convinced me that configurable syntax is an idea that people
just don't like. Thinking a bit more, I realized that humans don't operate
well with configurable syntax. To use the hackneyed comparison, no natural
language or similar concoction has configurable syntax. Not even musical
notation or whatnot. There's one syntax for every human language. I
speculated that humans can learn one syntax for a language and then wire
their brains to just pattern match semantics using it. Configurable syntax
just messes with that approach, and besides makes any program hugely
context-dependent and consequently any large program a pile of crap.
So I take it AST Macros are no longer on the table for D3?
AST macros can be implemented to not allow configurable syntax.
Andrei
