On 8/25/11 9:13 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/25/2011 6:30 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 8/25/11 6:10 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/25/2011 6:04 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Oh god no, don't ban that. I *like* to do that sort of thing:
Unusual, but legitimate. I think I'll shelve the idea.
It would be great to reconsider. The counter-argument is very weak.
We've already put a number of special cases in the grammar to ward off
"bugs".
But I worry that we might wind up tarting up the language with too many
a boatload of them, to the point where it becomes a confusing mass. At
what point should Meg Ryan stop with the plastic surgery? :-)
It's a legitimate concern, and there's no right response to it. My point
is that the argument is weak and caving to it would be a mistake. In
essence Nick claims he can't be bothered to change:
if (long_expression_one)
if (long_expression_two)
if (long_expression_three)
statement
with
if ((long_expression_one)
&& (long_expression_two)
&& (long_expression_three))
statement
which adds a grand total of two parens. The claim "blah blah long thing
with the simple unrelated condition requiring ugly line breaks and
screwy formattng/alignment in a big pita to read uber-expression. fuck
this shit. It looks ok in english, but in code the damn thing reads like
a fucking regex" does not stand scrutiny, and mixing in the matter of
indentation is a red herring as indentation is unaffected by the
introduction of the rule.
I'll also note that the argument smacks of the misleading vividness
fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_vividness). We
shouldn't shelve an idea because a poor argument against it was
eloquently phrased.
Finally, we've derived significant benefits from ideas in the same
spirit. I don't see signs that we've started overdoing it, or that the
returns are diminishing. To me all signs point to a fertile approach to
explore.
Andrei
