On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Slava Pestov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 5:12 AM, Nikhil Marathe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
> > Yes I understand that Perl is much much worse, but I don't think a new
> > language should even attempt to come close to it
> > when expressiveness has been attained with minimal syntax and no
> extraneous
> > default language constructs ( Lisp, Python )
>
> Actually Factor has the most minimal syntax of all: you have
> whitespace separated tokens, which are either numbers, or words. Words
> marked as parsing words are invoked at parse time and can reflectively
> invoke the parser. Most parsing words either define literal syntax for
> data types, or create definitions for new words. That's pretty much
> all there is to it.
>
> Slava
>
That's right, but in the case of Factor every word then assumes a syntax
like quality doesn't it? ( atleast it does to me )
Since words are all there is, there is no contextual information available
as in C like languages ( blocks, loop keywords, variable names )
So words with ':' ending them, mean they take some arguments after them. [ ]
becomes a 'syntax' for quotations, { } for arrays and so on.
And when reading programs, when you come across new words, you have no idea
how many stack items they accept and what they release. So this is another
thing which gets me, because jumping to another prompt and doing '\ word
help' breaks the flow.
And unless you use them lots of times bi@, bi* and bi can be pretty
confusing. I'm not saying that these too should be expanded into more
meaningful names of course.
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