On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 09:46:23 UTC, Tobias Pankrath
wrote:
On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 08:47:23 UTC, Boyd wrote:
If you're out for easier code readability, then I'd recommend
not to bother with syntax too much. It'll only get you a
slight readability increase at most, and you'll piss off
anyone who doesn't agree with you, or doesn't want to refactor
his code.
I've been experimenting with language design a bit and I found
that a much bigger issue with coding, is that we still use
files and plain text. An IDE where code is represented in a
simple tree and saved in a database, for example, would
improve things dramatically, and no language changes would be
necessary.
It wouldn't. When I was working for a SAP consulting company, I
wrote some parts of ABAP, which is stored in the database of
the SAP system itself and only accessible via the build in
"IDE". I would have killed for an decent IDE but there was no
way to easy access the code directly. Programming text are
nothing more than serialized tree data structures stored in a
common format.
Actually there was a EMACS plugin for "language-directed"
coding, where the editor knew the code structure and you could
only enter syntactically valid code. Like a "snippet plugin" on
steroids. However the author of the plugin itself admitted that
this was a wrong direction and is back to text editing.
I agree that you wouldn't want code to be precisely constraint to
what's syntactically correct. Function bodies in particular
benefit quite a bit from just manually typing text. But a tree
structure of all modules, classes, functions, properties, etc...,
would go a long way.
