On 4/26/2018 3:29 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
The theory goes:
A. "less syntax => easier to read".
B. "There's no technical need to require it, and everything that can be removed
should be removed, thus it should be removed".
Personally, I find the lack of parens gives my brain's visual parser
insufficient visual cues to work with, so I always find it harder to read. And
regarding "B", I just don't believe in "less is more" - at least not as an
immutable, universal truth anyway. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not.
Haskell seems to take the "minimal syntax" as far as possible (well, not as far
as APL which has a reputation for being write only). Personally, I find it makes
Haskell much harder to read than necessary.
Having redundancy in the syntax makes for better, more accurate error
diagnostics. In the worst case, for a language with zero redundancy, every
sequence of characters is a valid program. Hence, no errors can be diagnosed!
Besides, redundancy can make a program easier to read (English has a lot of it,
and is hence easy to read). And I don't know about others, but I read code an
awful lot more than I write it.
I posit that redundancy is something programmers learn to appreciate as they
gain experience, and that eliminating redundancy is something new programmers
think is a new idea :-)
P.S. Yes, excessive redundancy and verbosity can be bad. See COBOL.
