On 1/28/2015 3:14 PM, FG wrote:
On 2015-01-28 at 23:27, Walter Bright wrote:
Good language design has redundancy in it. Often people see the redundancy,
and advocate removing it as noise. But the redundancy has a valuable purpose -
diagnosing of errors, and offering suggestions for fixing the errors. If there
was no redundancy in the language, every random sequence of bytes would be a
valid program.
I'm quite sure I have read this very same thing not so long ago. :)
I repeat it regularly!
It's one of those things that one only learns the hard way, because the
subtleties of it are not at all obvious. It's one of the mistakes that
inexperienced language designers make again and again.
One of the other mistakes they make is the great idea of implicit declaration of
variables, and then ruefully have to deprecate/remove it a year or two later.
(How could those experienced designers have missed this obviously great feature?!?)
